Police deploy mobile fingerprint scanners

Mobile fingerprinting devices are being used across Surrey, UK, after the county was equipped with new technology, writes BBC News.

The mobile identification (MobileID) technology lets police check a person's identity on the street within minutes.

Last year, it was revealed all 43 police forces in England and Wales would start using the scanners.

Surrey Police said officers were now using the technology and had already used it to identify several people who they wanted to trace.

Burton Mail reports that Chief Inspector Phil Fortun, commander of the East Staffordshire Local Policing Team, said the new technology would only be used as a checking mechanism to search for existing fingerprint records and that scans obtained on the mobile devices would not be kept.

He said: “It could be very useful if our officers stop someone who doesn't want to give us their true identity. At the moment, we can do a check on the Police National Computer (PNC) but in the near future we'll be able to identify them through fingerprint records.

The system works by scanning the fingerprint of a suspect and then using a Bluetooth connection to send this encrypted data to an officer's BlackBerry device, which then cross-references it with the national fingerprint database, says V3.co.uk.

A suspect with information in the database is then easily identifiable, but the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) explained that no data captured by the device is stored in the system, and that it merely checks existing records.