On 23 May 2012 the
Metropolitan Police issued a press release announcing that they are now using
mobile fingerprint equipment. Patrolling policemen will check the fingerprints
of suspects they have stopped in the street and let them go if their prints are
not on file, thereby saving police
time.
The only figures
published by the Home Office date from 2004
and suggest that this fingerprinting technology fails about 20 percent of
the time in about 20 percent of cases no match will be made even if the
subject's prints are on file. Which suggests that the chances of guilty people
being taken down to the station and arrested have just dropped by about 20
percent. Not only in the Met but in 27 other police forces.
That cannot be the intention of the Home Office. But it
is the ineluctable conclusion of the Home Office's own evidence police time
will be saved by allowing 20 percent more criminals to avoid
arrest.
Perhaps Nick
Herbert, the policing minister at the Home Office, would like to
comment in the House on this new way
of saving police time. Or maybe Metropolitan
Police Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley and/or the National Policing
Improvement Agency could provide the public with respectable, academic
statistics proving that flat print fingerprinting technology is now reliable
enough.
Without that, it is hard to see how the public can have
any confidence in this latest Home office initiative and hard to see why a
bemused criminal fraternity shouldn't now be
celebrating.
Yours sincerely
David
Moss
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