The National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) is rolling out 100 mobile fingerprinting devices to a further 10 police forces this month, as part of the Lantern project, which saw the devices initially rolled out to 10 forces last year. There are now 200 devices on trial across 20 forces in the UK.
The NPIA says the piloting of the devices over the last 18 months has shown significant time savings when police officers are trying to establish the identity of persons stopped in the street. Of the forces using Lantern together with Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR), for the cases which showed a time saving, the average was more than an hour per stop. British Transport Police saw their encounters which achieved a time saving average at about 30 minutes per case. And in a survey of officers, 90% estimated that Lantern was saving at least 30 minutes per case.
In addition to faster response times, the devices give officers access to increased support and back-up, making their jobs safer, and reduce the number of prisoners that need to be processed by custody suites.
Lanterns overarching purpose is to establish a persons identity using their fingerprints, away from the police station, thus increasing the time officers spend on the frontline. It enables the capture of fingerprint details suitable for identifying individuals in an operational environment. It also allows real-time searching of the national fingerprint collection on the National Automated Fingerprint System (IDENT1).
The Lantern device works by electronically scanning the subjects index fingers, which are sent using encrypted wireless transmissions to the central fingerprint database. A real-time search against the national fingerprint collection of 7.5 million prints is performed. Any possible matches are identified and transmitted to an officer in a target time of less than five minutes. NPIA says the Lantern pilot will aid the development of a potential national solution for use by all forces by demonstrating how it performs in an operational environment.
Lantern forms part of a wider programme to help reduce bureaucracy in the police service and increase visibility of police officers to the public, says NPIA Chief Information Officer, Richard Earland. As the pilot continues, the NPIA will look at the longevity of the programme and the benefits it presents to improve policing.