Georgia law enforcement to use palm prints to solve crimes

According to television station WALB, law enforcement in the state of Georgia will not only be using fingerprints to catch outlaws, but will soon be adopting a new technology – palm prints.

Georgia’s AFIS unit at the Dougherty County Jail, which already has 150,000 latent palm prints on file, will soon utilize palm prints to help solve outstanding crimes.

“AFIS stands for Automated Fingerprint Identification System,” stated Sgt. Karen Parr who has 17 years experience in the department. “When investigators dust for prints at crime scenes from around south Georgia, the latent copies often find their way into a computer housed in a secure office at the jail. Then we try and determine the value of those prints and then run those through AFIS, or the I-AFIS, to see if we come up with a match,” Parr added.

Parr disclosed that the housed prints would also be used to match prints through FBI’s database. She also said that the state obtains more palm prints from crime scenes than fingerprints.

“Matching them though, isn’t always that easy..” said Parr. “New palm print technology will come into play to fix that. When we would compare palm prints, it was a one-to-one comparison. Now we’re going to be able to build a database so we can search it like fingerprints.”

Parr also mentioned that with the upgraded AFIS, they would be able to access the FBI data that will substantially help them in solving both new and old cases.

Do you think using the palm print technology will greatly help in solving both old and new crimes?

Article Topics

fingerprint biometrics  |  Georgia  |  law enforcement  |  Palm  |  palm prints  |  security  |  technology