Columbus, Ohio police just spent about $120,000

in federal homeland security grant money to buy 40 cellular-enabled fingerprint scanners which will allow officers to run a fingerprint of a suspect against 250,000 prints in the city's fingerprint database, according to the Associated Press. The department says the Rapid Identification Terminal (wi-fi enabled!) will cut down on crime since officers will no longer have to route a suspected criminal to the central office, where fingerprinting can take up to an hour. This doesn't replace that procedure but let's officers find out if the person they've stopped has outstanding warrants or may be lying about his or her identity.

Of course, the temptation is going to be for the police to use this at every opportunity. And they might have gotten a hand from a recent Supreme Court case which upheld a Nevada law that requires someone to provide identification or identify themselves verbally during a Terry stop. A Terry stop is a situation where an officer believes a crime has or is about to occur and wants to stop someone to ask them questions. In this situation, police are allowed to stop someone, frisk them for weapons only and depending on state law, require the person to identify himself (any cop can ask you most anything). The Supreme Court upheld a challenge to the identification requirement, saying that police should be able to check if the person has outstanding warrants, in order to better protect the officer. (The annoyingly vague decision did not decide whether a person who actually has a warrant for his arrest can refuse to provide their name on the grounds that it would be self-incriminating, since the man in this case had no warrants against him. The court didn't even rule if it was kosher to simply provide a name in lieu of pulling a driver's license out of your pocket).

So now the legal question becomes can an officer require a person caught in a Terry stop to provide his or her fingerprints to find the same information? Can you now get fingerprinted in a traffic stop? And if so, do the police get to keep the prints in their databases?

Dollars to cop donuts, the next time Columbus cops roll up on some kids standing on a street corner in a rundown neighborhood, they aren't just going to ask for identification, they will either force the kids to provide their fingerprints or intimidate them into doing so ( e.g. "There's the easy way and the hard way, but either way, we'll find out" etc.) Anyhow, till the Supreme Court gets around to figuring it out, remember you don't have to give your fingerprints until you are actually arrested and you mostly have the right to remain silent, regardless of whether a cop tells you that or not.

A genuine fully-redacted page from a Freedom of Information Act request to the commenter who comes up with the bestest explanation of what handheld fingerprint readers in Cleveland Columbus, Ohio have to do with anti-terrorism measures. Also feel free to comment on the unreliability of fingerprints as identifiers (e.g. This $2 million mistake).

Hat Tip: RC