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Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS)

The Fingerprint Sourcebook - Chapter 6


National Institute of Justice

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Introduction

Prior to the industrial revolution and the mass migrations to the cities, populations lived mostly in rural communities where everyone knew everyone else and there was little need for identification. Indeed, there were no police forces, no penitentiaries, and very few courts. As cities became crowded, crime rates soared and criminals flourished within a sea of anonymity. Newspapers feasted on stories of lawlessness, legislatures quickly responded with more laws and harsher penalties (especially for repeat offenders), and police departments were charged with identifying and arresting the miscreants. Identification systems—rogues’ galleries, anthropometry, Bertillon’s “portrait parlé”, and the Henry system—emerged and quickly spread worldwide at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century.

The late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed another era of civil turmoil and an unprecedented rise in crime rates, but this era happened to coincide with the development of the silicon chip. The challenges inherent in identification systems seemed ready-made for the solutions of automatic data processing, and AFIS—Automated Fingerprint Identification System—was born.

During this same period, The RAND Corporation, working under a national grant, published The Criminal Investigative Process (Greenwood et al., 1975), a comprehensive study and critique of the process by which crimes get solved—or do not. Generally critical of traditional methods used by detectives, the study placed any hopes for improvement on physical evidence in general and latent prints in particular. In a companion study, Joan Petersilia concluded that: No matter how competent the evidence technician is at performing his job, the gathering of physical evidence at a crime scene will be futile unless such evidence can be properly processed and analyzed. Since fingerprints are by far the most frequently retrieved physical evidence, making the system of analyzing such prints effective will contribute the most toward greater success in identifying criminal offenders through the use of physical evidence. (Petersilia, 1975, p 12)

Though new technology was already in development at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), it would be a popular movement at the local and state levels that would truly test Petersilia’s theory.

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