8 US states renew contract for NEC’s ABIS services

A consortium of U.S. western states has renewed a multimodal biometric ID system contract with electronics vendor NEC Corporation of America for 10 years.

The governmental group will continue to use NEC’s Integra-ID5 MBIS through 2032, according to the company. A dollar value on the ID as a service’s renewal has not been made public.

The Western Identification Network‘s member states are Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington and Utah as well as local police agencies. WIN has worked with NEC America’s biometric software since 1989.

Officers in each state use it to search each other’s criminal and civil biometric databases. It also gives officers the same systems in neighboring states and local law enforcement agencies as well as with the FBI’s Next Generation ID system. FBI Criminal Justice Information Services-compliant data centers host the software.

“Renewing our contract with NEC for another 10 years is a testament to the trust and strong relationship Western Identification Network has built with them over the years,” says WIN chief executive Ken Bischoff.

Under previous contracts, NEC upgraded WIN’s automated biometric ID system to version 3, which NEC says made using the system faster and easier to manage.

The American subsidiary of the Japanese electronics giant also migrated and converted data including sorting 28 million duplicated ten-print records.

NEC boasts that there has been a 97.6 percent decrease in the number of verifications that latent-print examiners have had to do because of the upgraded ABIS.

Article Topics

Alaska  |  biometric identification  |  biometrics  |  criminal ID  |  MBIS  |  NEC America  |  police