Posted on: Saturday, February 23, 2002
Big Island police reduce paperwork
Advertiser Staff
HILO, Hawai'i — The Big Island Police Department is the first in the state to implement a new electronic fingerprinting and mug-shot system.
The system shortens from two months to two hours the time it takes to find out if a suspect is wanted elsewhere in the United States, said Liane Moriyama, administrator of the Hawai'i Criminal Justice Data Center, which is part of the Department of the Attorney General.
For police officers, she said, the greatest benefit is the time saved in processing suspects.
It used to take an hour to obtain fingerprints and snap an instant photograph of a suspect and to fill out paperwork. Now the job can be done in 20 minutes.
The pilot project, in use in the South Hilo and Kona districts, cost $490,000, with the money coming from a variety of sources. The state has received an additional $1 million through the National Governors Association that Moriyama said will be used to expand the system to more rural police districts on the Big Island and to start similar projects for the Kaua'i Police Department and the Honolulu Sheriff's Office.
Moriyama said the state has 18 to 24 months to implement the project.
"After that, we hope to find additional funding to expand the system to the remaining counties," she said.
The new system integrates the functions of Livescan, a computerized fingerprinting system, and Crime Capture, an electronic mug shot system, with a computer program dubbed the "Green Box."
Once officers in Hilo or Kona electronically photograph and fingerprint a suspect directly into the police department's computer system, the "Green Box" assembles the information into formats that can be read by the state's Offender-Based Transaction Statistics/Computerized Criminal History and Automated Fingerprint Identification System.
The data can then be forwarded to the FBI, which can electronically compare a suspect's fingerprints with the more than 38 million prints in its computers.
The FBI can respond to the query within two hours — a process that now can take up to two months, Moriyama said.
For the police department's Records and Identification Section, the biggest savings is in the time it takes to present a photo lineup, said Lt. Edwin Tanaka.
