After a three week trial, the system is about to be put to use by West Yorkshire Police Peter Byrne/PA Images

Police in the UK have started using a mobile fingerprinting system that lets them check the identity of an unknown person in less than a minute. Fingerprints collected on the street will be compared against the 12 million records contained in national criminal and immigration fingerprint databases and, if a match is found, will return the individual’s name, date of birth and other identifying information.

Officers will only resort to fingerprint scanning if they cannot identify an individual by other means, says Clive Poulton, who helped manage the project at the Home Office. The devices might be used in cases where someone has no identifying information on them, or appears to be giving police a fake name. “[Police] can now identify the person in front of them – whether they are known to them or not known to them, and then they can deal with them,” Poulton says.


There are currently two major national databases of fingerprints. The first, called IDENT1, contains fingerprints gathered by the police when they take someone into custody. Anyone convicted of a serious crime may have their fingerprints stored on the database indefinitely. People who were not convicted but are arrested or charged in connection with a serious crime may also have their fingerprints stored on the database for up to five years, or indefinitely if they were convicted of another crime.

The other database, IABS, contains fingerprints collected from non-UK citizens when they enter the country. The Home Office had to build a new app that enables offers to easily search both of these databases simultaneously,but people fingerprinted using this system will have their details automatically deleted from the device as soon as the databases have been searched.

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The system has been in development for the last twelve months, and was trialled by West Yorkshire Police for three weeks before being rolling out 250 scanners to its officers. “It’s effectively available to every officer,” says Poulton.

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Fingerprint scanners on smartphones aren’t large enough to capture the detail needed to check against these national databases, so the Home Office had to opt for handheld scanners that connect to the smartphones that officers carry anyway. The idea is that officers take scans of the tips of two fingers and then these are checked against the more detailed scans that are taken from suspects in police custody.


“Most of the people we deal with from a criminal point of view tend not to carry anything with them that would identify them,” says Ian Williams, a chief inspector with West Yorkshire Police. Before this new system was introduced, if officers did want to make sure of someone’s identity, they would have to take that individual into police custody in order to have their fingerprints taken. A process that used to take several hours can now be completed within a few minutes, Williams says.

Although the system is mainly geared towards suspected criminals, it could also be used to identify someone who was unconscious and needed medical treatment. “Or even a dead person,” Williams says. As well as a person’s name and date of birth, the criminal database includes information on whether someone has a drug dependency or has certain mental health issues that may impact their care.

Earlier this week, the UK parliament’s Science and Technology Committee grilled the Home Office about its long-delayed biometric strategy. Originally intended for publication in 2012, Home Office minister Susan Williams told MPs it would now be made available this June. The government has attracted criticism for failing to adhere to a 2012 High Court ruling that prevents the government from keeping images of innocent people on file. To date, the government’s custody image database has already amassed 21 millions images of people’s faces and identifying faces.