In Karnataka, portable fingerprint scanners help police crack down on crime

The Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) in Karnataka, which was already proving beneficial in identifying mostly burglars and their criminal records on the basis of prints collected by experts from crime scenes, is now also being deployed to check the criminal records of people found to be moving suspiciously – especially at night – due to its new portable, real-time capabilities

A pocket-friendly scanner linked to a mobile phone app and a central database of fingerprints will now enable police constables to conduct on-the-spot checks of the criminal history of a suspicious individual without having to travel to a central office to check the data on the suspect.

Linked to a portable scanner, the AFIS has checked 93,645 fingerprints over the last year-and-a-half and has found 3,294 matches with criminal records – with the majority of instances occurring in Bengaluru during the night rounds of policemen, Additional Director General of Police Umesh Kumar, head of the Karnataka police modernisation wing, said.

“There are over 2 lakh fingerprints of persons involved in property crimes in the database. The system only matches new fingerprints with the database of fingerprints and confirms whether there is a criminal record or not. There is no collection of fingerprint data,” Kumar said.

“Each machine costs only Rs 2,500 and can be provided to all districts. At present, four to five devices have been given to police stations with large numbers of cases, and other stations, around two each. The project has been implemented over the last few months,” he said.

The portable fingerprint scanners are being used by the Bengaluru police on a pilot basis at a few police stations and by the Crime Branch. “There is no privacy issue involved. Like in the case of Aadhaar, which involves a question of yes or no regarding an identity, here it is whether there is a criminal record or not. It is part of the CCTNS project,” Bengaluru Police Commissioner C H Prathap Reddy said.

“The fingerprint data that is uploaded in the application is mainly to prevent thefts, robbery and burglary. As the State Crime Records Bureau already has the fingerprint database of people who were previously arrested in crimes, it will help to track the history of the people if they are roaming around suspiciously,” said Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime) in Bengaluru City Raman Gupta. The application will also help nab criminals who have failed to attend courts and facilitate better coordination in carrying out arrests by creating notifications, he said.

The software for the system has been created by Capulus Technologies, an IT firm in Karnataka that is working with the state on the M-CCTNS project. According to Nithin Kamath, the director of Capulus Technologies, Karnataka is one of four advanced states in implementing the CCTNS project.

The AFIS system in Karnataka is one of the most advanced and ahead of a national system, say police.

“This module helps to instantly perform fingerprint identification of any person to check whether he is present in a criminal database. The module acts as the mobile app client for the AFIS if already present or it can have its own AFIS server at the back end. The app will communicate with an external portable fingerprint scanner connected to the mobile phone and provides an interface to scan the fingerprint of the person being investigated,” Kamath said on social media.

“The app will securely communicate the captured fingerprint to the central biometric gateway through APIs and send it to AFIS. AFIS performs the fingerprint identification on the whole database and gets the result. If the application finds a positive ID, fingerprint results will be linked to the criminal’s demographic details present in the Person of Interest module and a complete criminal profile is instantly displayed in the officer’s phone,” Kamath said.