CHENNAI: What is the first step towards cracking a crime? Fingerprints lifted from a crime scene, any policeman worth his salt would say. This was the reason behind the State police embarking on an ambitious mission to store and correlate fingerprints in a digital database in 1998.
The importance of the system cannot be stressed enough and even the policy note of the home department for the current year allocated Rs 2.47 crore to upgrade the Fingerprint Analysis and Criminal Tracing System (FACTS) from its 5.0 version to 7.0. However, the catch is: the system has been lying dysfunctional for the past three years, allegedly because the software company providing the system was not properly paid.
What this means is that officers in fingerprint bureaux across the State are painstakingly checking the fingerprints manually, a practise considered as a stone-age relic in the field of forensic science.
Tamil Nadu was one of the first State to implement a centralised system in 1998 to preserve and correlate the enormous amount of fingerprints collected each day by police across the State.
“The system is not working since 2013 and we manually cross-check fingerprints. For example, if any police station sends us a fingerprint lifted from a crime spot, we have to manually check all the fingerprints to find out if any habitual offender was involved,” says an officer in a fingerprint bureau in Chennai.
Despite the allocation of huge amounts for the modern software, the failure to sort out the problems with the company is costing manpower loss in the police department.
“One special team was formed to upload fingerprint data to the computer. Once we receive a chance fingerprint from a crime scene, the software would narrow down to say a 100 similar fingerprints on the database. Since the software is dysfunctional, we have to go through the entire records manually,” says an officer.
Another issue miring the bureau is manpower loss. From 16 inspectors, the number of officials in the fingerprint bureau has dwindled to just three – of whom two are reaching the end of their appointment period.
Lack of experts would affect the functioning of the wing which in turn will impact investigations, warned a retired inspector, R Varadaraju.
“Unlike most other facets of crime investigation, fingerprint is completely based on science. It requires expertise. Field work alone won’t help crack cases and bring down crime rate,” says Varadaraju, who retired from the bureau in 2005.
However, when contacted, senior officials at the State Crime Record Bureau denied that the server has not been working for three years as alleged. “We have been facing trouble only for six few months, not three years. The SCRB had sought the latest version, and is now waiting for the upgradation,” a senior officer of the bureau told Express.
Considering the backlog, the manpower should also be strengthened, added Varadaraju. “One inspector or SI can check a maximum of 10-15 slips a day. We need 30 officials at that level, just to deal with the processing of daily work,” he pointed out.