With an ever-growing collection of fingerprints, Idaho Falls police can identify suspects with the click of a button.
Entering more than 500 fingerprints a month, the police department's identification system has grown to nearly 14,000 sets of fingerprints.
The Idaho State Police is the only other law enforcement agency in the state with such a system, crime scene technician Krissy Gittins said.
Since 2008, the fingerprints of anyone booked into the Bonneville County Jail remain on file – available for police to compare with prints lifted at crime scenes.
"It's also helpful if we want to eliminate somebody,"Gittins said. "If somebody's a victim in a case and we want to make sure it's not their fingerprint, we can have them come in and give us a set of their fingerprints voluntarily and we will enter it into the database."
The beauty of the police department having its own system is that within the same day, investigators know whether a fingerprint found at a crime scene matches someone in the database, Gittins said.
Before installing the system, police investigators were forced to send prints to the Idaho State Police lab in Meridian, which could take months to get results.
In 2008, the police department used a $22,350 grant to buy the fingerprinting system, Capt. Ken Brown said. In 2010, the agency obtained a second grant, for $12,450, to buy unlimited storage for the system.
"When we started looking at this system, we were looking at who's committing the most crime," Brown said. ""It's generally people from this area.""
Fingerprints can help solve a variety of crimes, Gittins said, including burglaries.
"I've lifted prints off of windowsills where they tried to pull themselves up into the window,"" she said. ""The frame around the window screens where they took the screen out is a place where I've been pretty successful getting prints off of."
Fingerprints can be lifted from almost any surface. Wood, paper, plastic, metal, leather and textured surfaces – even skin – can hold fingerprints, Gittins said.
Fingerprints are collected using a fine powder that makes them visible. The fingerprint impressions then are lifted using an adhesive. Fingerprints also can be photographed.
Once retrieved, a fingerprint is scanned into the identification system at the police department's crime lab.
The police department is still required to get the print verified by a fingerprint expert to ensure it is a match and before a warrant can be issued. The police department uses an expert at the ISP lab in Meridian, Gittins said.
Many of the prints Gittins collects are partial prints; others are smudged or don't yield enough detail to make a match.
"Things like pop cans, where they've handled it several times … are difficult because the fingerprints will overlap so many times that you can't single out one print," Gittins said.
When trying to make a fingerprint match, it's the tiny details that matter.
"A lot of people have left loops and a ton of people have whorls and arches and things like that," she said. "All of these tiny little characteristics in the print, or the minutia points, are what sets it apart."
Police Chief Steve Roos said the investment in the fingerprint identification system has proven worthwhile.
"We solve more crimes with it," he said.