by Emmanuel H. Joseph
Government Information Service
Telecoms Director, Sylvester Cadette,
symbolically hands over equipment to Acting
Police Commissioner, Hobbs Jno. Baptiste
The Dominica Police force has received new equipment which will assist the Criminal Investigation Department in its quest to fight crime in a more expedient manner. The fingerprinting equipment is valued at one hundred and four thousand East Caribbean dollars and was sourced with funds from the European Union under the ICT Development Programme.
Head of the Criminal Investigation Department, Duke Severin, speaking at the symbolic handing over ceremony on Friday, 26th June, 2009 said that the system comes at a time when the police department is expected to do more in terms of crime fighting but the manual process of processing finger prints was a daunting and time consuming one.
“We recognise that the public does not want to accept anything but the best from us. One of the major areas of concern was that of fingerprint identification. Substantial delays were a normal part of the fingerprint identification process because of the manual methods of utilising that process. The Police Department, recognising the need for greater efficiency in this area of crime detection, formed a partnership with the Information and Communications Technology Development Programme leading to the acquisition of the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification system otherwise known as IAFIS or AFIS.”
Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification
System, IAFIS
Mr. Severin went on to explain the capabilities of the system.
“This IAFIS is a fingerprint and criminal history system similar to the type of fingerprint and palm print system maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The IAFIS provides automated fingerprint search capabilities, latent searching capabilities, electronic image storage and electronic exchange of fingerprint and responses. With IAFIS, the Criminal Investigation Department and the Dominica Police Force on a whole will be able to facilitate the electronic exchange of fingerprint and responses with the other jurisdictions. The IAFIS will be able to maintain the largest biometric database in the Criminal Investigation Department containing fingerprints and corresponding criminal history information for all criminal suspects in our database.”
The fingerprinting facility is already in operation at the Police Headquarters and officers have been trained in the use of the equipment. Mr. Severin sees this as crucial in aiding officers to become more productive, better crime scene technicians and leaders in crime scene investigation. This will in turn lead to a greater motivated force to crime investigators around them.
Mr. Severin went on to say that the equipment has already been in use and its impact already has been felt. It is his wish that the impact will be far and long reaching.
Head of the Criminal Investigation
Unit of the Commonwealth of
Dominica Police Force, Duke Severin
“It is my hope, that as we take maximum advantage of the system and make use of its capabilities, the general public is going to benefit from our successes. Already, we have made a match fingerprint to a crime scene which has assisted in identifying a known criminal to a crime. The police department is pleased, elated and feels fortified to be equipped with that system.”
The new equipment is a ten print based finger print identification system which supports both electronic and hard copy submission of latent prints. It also processes documents associated with criminal history record received by electronic input or machine readable data format. The IAFIS equipment is also capable of supplying electronic images of fingerprints to authorised agencies, upon request, when fingerprints are acquired as a result of any police station on the island. |
