Sheriff unveils new fingerprint technology

The Sarasota Sheriff’s Office has a new, cutting-edge tool to use in the fight against crime.

The Sheriff’s Office announced Thursday that it had upgraded its 10-year-old Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) to the Morpho Biometric Identification Solution (MorphoBIS) — touted as the world’s most accurate fingerprint matching technology.

MorphoBIS supplements the AFIS database of biometric data, allowing law enforcement to easily incorporate additional clues such as faces, tattoos and iris images.

AFIS already taps into county criminal databases, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) and the FBI for searches of tenprint, palmprint, and latent fingerprint data processing.

MorphoBIS expands the amount of data available to deputies to identify and arrest criminals.

“We are already getting hits on crime scene prints that were previously unidentified in the old system” AFIS Supervisor Brenda Viana said in a prepared statement. “Even low quality prints that couldn’t be searched are being identified on the new system.”

Contact Nolan Peterson at [email protected]