Page 57 - Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS)

42 AUTOMATED FINGERPRINT IDENTIFICATION SYSTEMS

The criminal justice community was in the process of appealing to both Con-
gress and the FBI for federal investments to help improve turnaround time at
the FBI’s IDENT Division (ID). When Judge William Sessions was sworn in as
Director of the FBI in late 1987, the response time was already inadequate. By
the end of 1989, the backlog of user submissions had reached the unprece-
dented level of 750,000 fingerprint cards and several million criminal history
data submissions. The number of fingerprint cards alone represented approx-
1
imately 5 weeks of peak processing effort by the ID. The passage of the Anti-
Drug Abuse Act in 1988 and the passage of the Airports Security Act in 1989
put the FBI under even more pressure to maintain complete, accurate, and
immediately available criminal history files.
In June 1989, at the Advisory Policy Board (APB) meeting in Aurora, Col-
orado, the FBI enlisted the support of the then NCIC APB to review the ID’s
strategies and plans. Director Sessions personally asked the Chairman of the
APB to appoint an ad hoc subcommittee to address FBI ID matters, including
2
services and automation. The APB established an ID Revitalization Task Force,
chaired by Joseph Bonino of the Los Angeles Police Department. The task force
produced a conceptual road map for revitalization of the ID. They realized that
this was not just an AFIS throughput problem but more of a complex system
problem that called for a systems-based solution.
The only way to decrease response times even as the volume of transactions
increased was to address the six basic elements of the problem in an integrated
solution. The problem looked like this:

• The vast majority of incoming fingerprint images were inked on cards that
had to be either mailed in or scanned and sent over the slow speed modems
(28.8kbps) of that time period.
• Responses had to be transmitted electronically, because mailed responses
would never arrive in time for bail hearings, etc.
• Standards had to be developed that would permit images captured elec-
tronically or scanned to be read by any state AFIS and by IAFIS.
• The fingerprint records would have to be stored as images for on-screen ver-
ification. In the usual procedure of that time, cards were scanned, features
extracted, and images deleted because disk space was so expensive, costing
about $250 per megabyte (MB) in 1990.
• A high-performance network had to be implemented that would tie the crim-
inal justice community to the IAFIS system.

1 IAFIS Acquisition Plan, FBI, Version 1, January 20, 1992.
2 FBI Memorandum from Assistant Director L. York, ID, to Deputy Director J. E. Otto, dated
10/13/89.