Blue Checks Police Technology and the Future of Law Enforcement

In the world of science fiction, police are in possession of some of the most advanced and exotic technologies imaginable, which aid in the identification and capture of criminals who try to evade the law. In movies like Robo-Cop, this concept is taken to the ultimate extreme, where police androids are retrofitted with digital scanners, sensors and weaponry that make the U.S. Special Forces look like child play. While most of those technologies are pure fantasy, law enforcement personnel are now quickly becoming armed with a new and amazing wireless criminal identification system called Blue Checks police technology.

Futuristic Blue Checks Police Technology

In August of 2009, the Houston Police Department announced that its traffic officers would be using an amazing new system called Blue Checks police technology. Blue Checks is centered upon a hand-held device, but the overall technology consists of an entire network of devices, wireless technology and data delivery systems. By using this new system, officers can walk up to a suspect and ask them to hold out their hand. The hand-held device digitally scans the digits of the suspect's hands, and within minutes the officer receives a full criminal background report on the individual. It's a system that has wanted persons and sex offenders very nervous.

How Blue Checks Work

The system is called "Blue Checks" because officers are able to run criminal checks on the fly while in the field. The starting point of the system is the hand-held device that officers use when they have a suspect at hand. The device is called the BlueCheck Mobile Fingerprint Scanner. It's a device created and distributed to Law Enforcement agencies by Cogent Systems. The technology itself may be advanced, but the process is rather simple.

- First, the officer has the suspect place each finger, one at a time, on the scanner pad of the Fingerprint Scanner. The scanner digitizes the suspect's fingerprints (up to 10) and then the officer can submit those prints for identification.

- Second, the prints are transmitted via Bluetooth wireless to a Blackberry device or a Laptop system in the officer's car. From the car, the prints are transmitted via Cellular data transmission to the State Police headquarters. State headquarters transfers the prints via a Wide Area Network (WLAN) to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

- Third, once the prints arrive at the FBI, the Bureau performs an extensive cross check with the Repository for Individuals of Special Concern (RISC). RISC is a massive database consisting of over 2 million records that include all wanted persons, sex offenders listed on the offender registry, and even known or suspected terrorists.

- Fourth, once the system finds an identification match based on the fingerprints, the persons true identity (with a certainty percentage from red to green) as well as details that the FBI has on file for the suspect are transmitted back to the State Bureau, which then transmits the identity details back to the officer in the field.

What Blue Checks Police Technology Means for Criminals

This technology promises to transform not only law enforcement across the world, but it will also make Homeland Security far more effective. Officers, who essentially serve as the front line against not only criminal elements but also the terrorist threat, no longer have to depend upon the human ability to identify an individual based on physical factors like hair and eye color, which are physical characteristics that criminals can easily alter.

With this new cutting-edge digital biometrics device, criminals can no longer hide behind physical disguise or even cosmetic modifications. Police now have the ability to literally "scan" the identity of an individual based on their fingerprints alone.

The technology is one excellent example of how federal and state agencies are working harder on integrating their various data sources in order to better enhance homeland security. Through the use of the latest wireless and biometrics technologies, law enforcement has now entered the exciting realm of science fiction where officers have more and more advanced tools to protect the public, and criminals have fewer and fewer places to hide.

For More Information

There is very little information available online about this new law enforcement technology, but you can learn more about how the system operates at the FBI's Next Generation Identification web page. There are also more advanced hand-held systems than the Blue Check device that directly transmit the fingerprints over cellular data networks without the need for a second device in the police car, like a Blackberry or a Laptop. You can learn more about the various police hand-held devices at the Cogent Systems web page.

The one thing that the public (and criminals) should take away from this development is that this is only the first step. As wireless data transmission and biometrics technologies continue to rapidly advance, the world's law enforcement agencies will evolve into an advanced security network that cannot be fooled or evaded.