The Police IT Organisation (Pito) has completed the
roll-out of a searchable palm print database to all police forces
in England and Wales.Investigators have collected palm prints for two years, but
national searching has not been possible until now.
The introduction of the Palm Searching system means that palm
prints found at crime scenes can be automatically searched against
a national database.
This is the first major extension of Ident1, the biometric
technology that is replacing the national automated fingerprint
identification system.
Ident1 will allow searching of all mainland UK records for the
first time, and has already been used successfully. Humberside
Police has reported 20 hits since starting to use the capability at
the beginning of March.
The Ident1 service contract was awarded to Northrop Grumman
Corporation in November.
The national police fingerprint database has crashed 96 times in
the past 12 months, according to a Home Office minister.
Hazel Blears, minister of state for crime, security and
communities, told parliament that 36 of these outages lasted for
more than two hours.
"There has been disruption and problems to the Ident1 service
during the migration process in the last few months," Blears said.
"These problems are being addressed by Pito and should result in a
robust and reliable service to the police forces being resumed as
soon as possible.