Numerous physical characteristics exist in each of us that enable law enforcement personnel to accurately identify criminal suspects. The most important are a person’s fingerprints, palm prints, facial features, irises and DNA. Individually these characteristics—which are unique to everybody—are called modalities. Three other significant modalities are a person’s gait, the timber of their voice and their vascular system—the manner in which veins and arteries grow also is unique to each individual—though these are emerging modalities.
Another important use for the data associated with these modalities concerns access control. This can pertain to physical locations as well as to computer and communications networks and systems. In a prison, for example, modalities can be used to restrict or allow prisoner movement and access to specific areas, such as the commissary, library, pharmacy or exercise yard.
Capturing, matching, archiving and sharing data associated with these modalities is accomplished via multimodal biometric identification systems (MBIS). Over time, background databases can be created that are extremely useful. For instance, let’s say that a person is arrested, resulting in their fingerprints being captured. Years later, the person is arrested again, and the fingerprints captured during that incident can be compared with the background database, which reveal that the person is a repeat offender. This is very useful information for law enforcement personnel and prosecutors to have at their fingertips—for example, if the person tried to use an alias for either arrest, they immediately would be exposed during the second arrest.
MBIS-generated data also comes in handy for civilian purposes. Someone seeking access to a vulnerable population—e.g., a baseball coach, scout leader, schoolteacher, school bus driver or assisted-living facility worker—might need to undergo a background check that would involve one or more of the aforementioned modalities. The last thing that any organization dealing with a vulnerable population would want to do is insert a felon into that environment, for numerous reasons, and the data generated and stored by an MBIS helps to prevent that from occurring.
The first MBIS emerged in the 1980s. Prior to that, gathering and comparing fingerprints—the only modality captured for decades—was a time-consuming manual process. Fingerprint identification was pioneered by Sir Francis Galton, an anthropologist who was a cousin to Charles Darwin. Galton determined that the fingerprint was a highly reliable identifier for two reasons: no two fingerprints are exactly alike, even in identical twins; fingerprints remain constant through a person’s lifetime. He also identified the three most common fingerprint types—loop, whorl, arch—and these classifications still are used today.
Galton published his findings in 1892; shortly thereafter, Sir Edward Richard Henry used those findings to develop a fingerprint-classification system that bears his name, and which became the dominant system used in law enforcement. In 1901, Scotland Yard leveraged the Henry Classification System to begin compiling fingerprint data, and two years later the New York City Police Department, New York State Prison System and Federal Bureau of Prisons followed suit.
In 1910, fingerprints were used for the first time to convict a murderer, which occurred in Illinois. The verdict was appealed but eventually upheld by the state’s Supreme Court. These court cases established the reliability of fingerprint evidence.
While the Henry Classification System was surprisingly efficient, it still was laborious—plus it only involved one modality. Leveraging the theory that more is better, an MBIS is a vast improvement upon reliance on fingerprints as the sole identification evidence in a criminal case.
However, such systems, when they first emerged roughly three decades ago, were prohibitively expensive. For that reason, six original (now eight) western states formed the Western Identification Network (WIN) as a means of pooling their resources to implement the first multistate, shared automated fingerprint identification system (AFIS). WIN, which is an MCP client, still exists today as a non-profit consortium of state and local law enforcement agencies that collectively maintains and shares a multistate MBIS. This was a remarkable achievement on several levels, but especially when one considers that it took the FBI many years to implement its first multistate AFIS.
Eventually, the AFIS capability expanded into today’s MBIS. And, like every technology solution, MBIS have evolved over the years. The following are a few of the most important current trends:
MCP has numerous subject-matter experts who are eager to chat with you about MBIS and the best approaches to implementing them—please reach out.
Chuck Collins is MCP’s vice president of public safety. He can be emailed at ChuckCollins@MissionCriticalPartners.com.