Home : Public Sector : News

Police get mobile fingerprint scanners

Agency says scheme to check identities while mobile will save police time, but civil rights groups have called for a stop to plans until legal protections are established.

By Miya Knights, 27 Oct 2008 at 11:40

gallery

The police have confirmed plans to expand trials of mobile fingerprint scanners nationwide.

The handheld biometric devices – about the size of a smartphone – are being rolled out to every police force in the UK under the Mobile Identification At Scene (Midas) scheme.

The system works by allowing an officer to scan a suspect’s fingerprints at the roadside before comparing them to the police national biometric database, Ident1.

Peter Mandich, National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) spokesman, told IT PRO that 200 trial handsets in use across 20 forces had been able to return identity confirmation from a suspect’s fingerprint scan in under two minutes, 87 per cent of the time, which he described as a “stunning success that would keep more officers on a community’s streets more of the time”.

The £40-million scheme has been designed to save officers the average 67 minutes needed to fingerprint a suspect back at a police station. And there are plans to further develop the system to transfer pictures of suspects as well, where development requirements were put out to European tender earlier this year.

But civil rights campaigners, concerned about increased powers of surveillance and random checks, called for the roll out to be halted until legal protections are put in place.

Although the NPIA confirmed mobile fingerprinting would be entirely voluntary and that no scanned fingerprints would be stored on any databases, some critics of the scheme questioned its ability to operate accurately and safely.

Cross-party campaigners against the National Identity Scheme and other public initiatives they maintain will create a database state, NO2ID pointed to failure rates, as high as 1 in 5 for fingerprints, in the only medium-scale test of biometrics on the general population to date, carried out by the UK Passport Service in 2004.

Phil Booth, NO2ID’s national coordinator, said: “This implies a completely new power for police to fingerprint you in the street, using an iffy technology. If refusing to cooperate can get you arrested, then you would have not just fingerprints but DNA on a criminal database for the rest of your life. That means the state can pick on anyone at any time.”