A federal grant means investigators at the Lee County Sheriff's Office will be able to analyze and match fingerprints found at crime scenes in about an hour rather than six months. The office recently received a $40,000 grant which provided equipment for fingerprint analysis, according to Capt. Jeff Johnson.
Before receiving the equipment, all fingerprint analysis had to be performed by the State Bureau of Investigation or another outside agency with the capability and inclination to do so. Matt Rosser, the department's crime scene investigator, said the Paul Coverdell Forensic Science Improvement Grant is "aimed at assisting local and state labs speeding up their processes." Rosser said he wrote the grant request for fingerprint analysis equipment because it was one of the biggest needs for the department that the officers on hand could learn easily." (Fingerprints are) typically the most found evidence at our crime scenes," he said. "If we'd tried to get equipment for hair fiber or DNA analysis, we'd need to get people with scientific experience in those areas." With the new equipment, every person who is booked at the Lee County Jail will be fingerprinted and that data will be entered into the system. Those prints can then be compared with any latent prints that are found at crime scenes.
Currently, if the new equipment shows a match, Lee County deputies still have to send that data off to be verified by two independent sources. But Rosser and one other detective at the department are currently training to be at least one of those sources, meaning the process will only get faster in the future.
Given the commonality with which prints are found at crime scenes, Rosser said being able to analyze that type of evidence in-house will make solving crimes that much easier. "If you have that type of evidence in a case, the defense's main focus will be trying to get it thrown out, one way or another, so it's a pretty important element," he said. For now, though Rosser has to build a database almost from scratch. He said he's prepared to spend plenty of his time in the coming weeks and months entering physical records of fingerprints going back a decade or more into the electronic system."I've probably got 8,000 fingerprint cards or more to put in the system," he said.
Thanks to Gordon Anderson with the Sanford Herald.
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