CLPEX Chat Board

Has anyone else ever been instructed by Senior Officers in their dept. to print the AFIS candidate list out and give it to Detectives as an investigative tool?

That is just wrong on so many levels that it is inviting a civil rights lawsuit. I would absolutely love to be arrested or even hauled in for questioning because I was a non-ident candidate on an AFIS list. The word for a person detained for that reason by police is millionaire (after the lawsuit is settled, of course).

When you make an identification and have it verified, that is an investigative lead -- but not before.

Thanks Pat.

The scenario we had was as follows:
A Latent was run and a candidate list created
We only had a trainee in the office, she knew it was Ident but would not say so.
She was then told to hand over the candidate list.
She stood her ground and refused and took to the latent to a neighbouring agency for them to ID and verify. The Detectives got their result that day.
However, We are now being requested to supply candidate lists if we are not able to make the comparisons quick enough for the Detectives. They had CCTV in this case and wanted to compare the images with the names on the list (We all know how good eyewitness evidence is).
I am not going to allow this to happen but would be grateful for any stated cases where this has gone wrong, guidance issued by IAI and just any examples others can give me etc.

I think your agency should look into acquiring a Facial Recognition system. We have had great success with ours here in Florida.
Contact me and I'll put you in touch with the system administrator who manages our F/R capabilities

We are now being requested to supply candidate lists if we are not able to make the comparisons quick enough for the Detectives.

Your director is allowing this?

No, I am not allowing it. I just wanted to see what experiences others had and how they had dealt with it. I am confident dealing with it, and it won't happen but I wondered how common this situation is and what others had done.

I'm waiting for this one to feature in CSI/NCIS/Law and Order/etc.

Investigator: "Can I have the candidate list for the unidentified latent please?"

Examiner: "Sure!" [hands over the list] "There's a list of fifteen people who definitely didn't commit the crime. Everyone else in the database could have done, but these fifteen, I've checked them, they didn't make that print."

Rushy, when I first read your post I was like the others------"you will have to pry it out of my cold dead hand".

But then I read your scenario. I changed my mind. I would have given it to them. You had a viable candidate in the wings---just a verification away. It is not like the whole candidate list was a non-match.

Then if they went down the whole list trying to pull up mug shots to compare with the video then they have some man-hours of work ahead. If they pulled the correct picture, then no problem. But if they pulled the wrong one-----just think of the egg on their face a few days later when the hit report comes out. They just put a big hole in their foot over that case. Can you image the headlines "Fingerprints Correct Eyewitness ID". Now that would surely shake up some attorneys that fingerprints were actually better evidence than an Eyewitness ID----who would have thought.

Now if there was no viable candidate on the list what so ever, then no I would not give it to them. They want to short cut the verification process and put their heads on the block----be my guest.

Rushy,

First, the trainee deserves a commendation for standing her ground and I salute her.

As for the other, I think the headline would actually read "Detectives Get Wrong Names From Fingerprint Section". If they wanted to compare images with names from the candidate list than our position and resources are being used to give over names of individuals who are, in fact, innocent and only wind up on a candidate list because of how the software, etc operates. Given the fact that the trainee knew that only one candidate was viable she was, essentially, protecting the rights of all other candidates from possible visual misidentification which a casual search of news stories shows is not only possible but has occurred. I would argue that the fact that we know this gives us the responsibility to act appropriately by withholding all such information until a true conclusion is reached.

Given the premise that I just laid out I would suggest to any requestors that to comply with the request would be unethical as even if they take "responsibility" we still have constructive knowledge and become part of the issue. Further, while it may be seem productive to give them a list of 100 candidates for them to "spin their wheels" on, we wind up becoming enablers of inefficiency which is against what the public rightfully expects of us. James Madison once wrote, "The end of all civil government is justice. There is no other." The job is hard enough as it is, let's not make it harder. This is what I think ought to be said to such requests, well-meaning or not.