Cops finger suspects on airwaves

The units are designed to identify persons of interest in real time, and the first 10 will be delivered in a few weeks.

"Field trials will begin in mid-June," NSW Police forensic services group superintendent Darryl Tuck said.

The devices, which can hold up to 180,000 biometric records, will enable police officers to quickly verify the identity of a person who has committed a traffic offence, for example.

"Possible offenders may say that they`re somebody but fingerprint checks will reveal that they`re someone else who has warrants or outstanding matters," Mr Tuck said. NSW Police has been working on the system with CrimTrac, the agency responsible for developing information-sharing solutions for law enforcement.

"Once fingerprints are scanned they will go across our internal network checked against CrimTrac`s fingerprints database via the Next G network," Mr Tuck said.

The trial will take place in city centres and rural NSW.

The results will decide whether Next G is up to the mark.

Prior to Telstra shutting down its CDMA network in favour of Next G, regional users said the new network didn`t operate as well in the bush as its predecessor.

"There shouldn`t be any black spots using the Next G network so that`s one of the things we`ll be testing to find out," Mr Tuck said. NSW Police hopes to save an enormous amount of time and paperwork with the project.

Currently, when a person is issued with an infringement notice, officers collect their fingerprints using an inkpad and paper.

"This device will allow us to collect the fingerprints electronically, which can then verify the identity of the person we`re dealing with.

"There won`t be the manual processing of the paperwork when the officer returns to the station," Mr Tuck said.

NSW Police has earmarked early 2009 for statewide deployment of 500 such devices, supplied by French company Sagem.

CrimTrac, which has seen the portable fingerprints project first conceptualised in 2005 and formally commence in September 2007, manages a biometrics database that contains millions of records. Under acting chief executive Stewart Cross, the agency recently bagged the peak e-government award at CeBIT for its National Police Reference System.