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August 04, 2008
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Penn. police take prints into their own hands
Suburban police, frustrated by backlogs at county lab, begin doing fingerprint analysis Related articles:
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Fingerprints on file, right from the patrol car
Crime scene imaging techniques By Michael A. Fuoco
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette PITSBURGH — On "CSI" and other TV procedural dramas, it all looks so easy. At every fictional crime scene, investigators invariably discover fingerprints, hairs, blood and other trace evidence. They rush the evidence to the lab where scientists drop whatever else they were doing and quickly put the forensic samples into a computer. Eureka! Suspect identified. Case closed. Roll credits. If only real life were like that. Often, there just isn't any trace evidence at crime scenes. And even when there is, labs rarely if ever immediately identify a suspect because so many cases are awaiting analysis. For years, the Allegheny County crime laboratory has been so backlogged with fingerprint cases, about 300 in all, that depending upon the crime, it can take up to a year for a latent print -- one found at a crime scene -- to be analyzed. That frustrates police because the majority of prints awaiting analysis involve burglary and theft cases, and suspects in those crimes tend to be serial criminals who steal to support drug habits. Lengthy delays in identification allow burglars and thieves to continue their crime sprees. Exasperated, the Allegheny County Chiefs of Police Association has set up its own fingerprint identification program, thereby bypassing the crime lab entirely. Funded by an initial $35,000 grant secured by Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr., the pilot project thus far includes 14 suburban departments that have officers trained in forensics. Mr. Zappala feels certain there will be additional grant funding, even enough to purchase a $60,000 Automated Fingerprint Identification System. Currently, the Pittsburgh Police Bureau is permitting the pilot program to use its AFIS. So successful has the program been in the early going -- about 40 cases have been undertaken -- that the time between submitting fingerprints and getting them analyzed has dropped to as little as a week, and sometimes, days. Moreover, the quality of prints being lifted by the trained municipal officers has been so high that the program is averaging an identification rate of 35 percent, well above the national average of 10 to 15 percent. "This is the way it's supposed to work," said Moon police Capt. Greg Seamon, whose department is one of those participating. "It's like night and day." Robinson police Chief Dale Vietmeier, president of the chiefs association, likewise expressed excitement, saying such a quick turnaround frees officers to move on to other investigations. "As far as I can see, so far it looks beautiful." Identifying the ID expert Key to the project's success, those involved said, was securing the services of fingerprint expert Wayne Reutzel, 56, who after 34 years with county agencies accepted a buyout in December. Mr. Reutzel is one of only 135 people in the world certified as a fingerprint examiner by the International Association for Identification, and local officers lauded his expertise and close working relationship with them. Mr. Zappala and Chief Vietmeier said law enforcement hereabouts couldn't afford letting someone like Mr. Reutzel leave the profession. Instead, they built a program around his forensic skills as well his ability to teach the county's municipal police officers about fingerprints. "On day one, he was solving cases," Mr. Zappala said, "and by day 365 we'll have a whole team of people who will have been trained by one of the best in the field." County Chief Executive Dan Onorato said he knew nothing of the chiefs association project until a reporter contacted him about it. In response, he said he plans to meet within two weeks with officials from the chiefs association and the district attorney's office to discuss their concerns about the crime lab, their project and "to see how we can incorporate this countywide." "We don't want to do things twice. We want to be efficient, consistent and provide high quality for the county," Mr. Onorato said. "I agree with them. We don't want backlogs. We want to get this resolved, which is why we're building a state-of-the-art crime lab." That $22 million project involves renovating and equipping a Strip District building for relocation in November of the Downtown crime lab and the county medical examiner's office, under whose auspices it falls. "One thing everyone agrees on is we have to deal with the backlog," Mr. Onorato said. "It's a historic backlog that goes back several administrations." From relics to rapid turnover Inside one of the mobile crime unit offices in Pittsburgh Police headquarters on the North Side are framed artifacts of former law enforcement ID systems. There are faded pictures of suspects on cards containing their Bertillion records, an identification system based on physical measurements. Along with photos, that was the standard used to identify suspects until fingerprinting supplanted it in the early 1900s. Within another frame is a suspect's "10 card," or rolled inked impressions of fingerprints. These days, ink no longer is used; suspects who are booked in any Pennsylvania county have their fingerprints rolled onto a computer scanner that digitally captures it into state and federal databases. Nearby, Mr. Reutzel sat before a flat-screen computer monitor and used AFIS to work on a burglary case from Mt. Lebanon. He scanned a latent print into the system and asked it to look through millions of prints in its database to find 15 people whose prints have similar characteristics. In minutes, AFIS did so, and Mr. Reutzel set about comparing the latent print with those of the 15 "candidates." Unlike on "CSI," the computer cannot make a positive match. Only a trained examiner is able to do that. Despite AFIS's speed, there's much work for an examiner. It took him about 10 hours to compare 17 prints lifted in the Mt. Lebanon burglary and, in the end, no match was found. The upside: Mt. Lebanon police now know the suspect either hasn't been arrested before or is a juvenile. And those latent prints are now stored in the database as "unknown." Should the suspect be arrested for some other crime and his prints entered into the system, AFIS will notify Mr. Reutzel that new prints are now on file that have similarities with those from the previous crime. In all, the turnaround took one day from the time Mt. Lebanon police delivered the prints to the Northern Regional Police Department, where the chiefs association has been given office space for the fingerprint project. Mr. Reutzel estimated that the crime lab case would have taken six months to analyze the case because of the backlog. "We're not sitting on anything anymore," he said. "The idea is to get it done as soon as possible." Applauding improvements Mr. Reutzel said that with a dedicated AFIS in his office and three planned satellite stations in the south, east and west, the turnaround time will improve even more. "I love this work," Mr. Reutzel said. "It's challenging and fun and now it's even better because it doesn't have a bureaucracy behind it. We have the solution, but like anything else it requires funding. The concept is going to work." Dormont police Chief Russ McKibben agreed. "We've had four matches already and got warrants on prints we submitted to [Mr. Reutzel] that wouldn't even have gotten close to being looked at by the county crime lab. It's fantastic. "It's a shame this had to happen. We already have a crime lab, so why does someone have to reinvent the wheel? The wheel's been there for years but it needs greased and taken care of." Shaler police Chief Jeff Gally said within a week of the program's start, his officers were able to make an arrest in a string of 14 burglaries in Shaler and Millvale based on prints submitted to Mr. Reutzel from two burglary scenes. "Politicians talk about mergers and promises and negotiations involving municipal police departments, and while they're deciding this the police are going out day to day and servicing their communities. We just pulled together to try to provide a solution," he said. "This is definitely the way to go. We're very happy." Copyright 2008 The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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