Finger Printing is set to be made much easier for the police with the introduction of a BlackBerry smartphone size mobile fingerprint scanner allowing police to do instant fingerprints scans in the street.

The new scheme called Mobile Identification at Scene will see every police force in the UK being issued this BlackBerry size hand held device according to the Guardian newspaper.

This will enable police to scan the suspect’s fingerprints there and then and compare with fingerprint records they have on the police national biometric database called Ident1.

The police have said that the procedure at present to check fingerprint takes on average 67 minutes, and the National Policing Improvement agency said that having this device would be equivalent to having 336 officers on the streets.

However campaigners are concerned that the fingerprints taken by the scanner should be deleted after use and not put onto the police database, saying that the police should make sure they are only taking prints of suspects when they can’t establish their identity.

Source: ukpress