The Union County Sheriff’s Office received approval yesterday to purchase new portable fingerprinting technology that they intend to make more accessible for public use than their current fingerprinting capabilities.
The Union County Quorum Court voted unanimously yesterday morning to approve an appropriation of $15,029.06, raised from the jail’s commissary sales, for the machine. Justice of the Peace Donald Brock, representing District 10, was absent.
“We could not have a Finance Committee meeting or a Quorum Court meeting without an ordinance from the Sheriff’s Office,” District 1 JP Mike Dumas, also chairman of the Quorum Court’s Finance Committee, said to laughs.
Roberts said the new digital fingerprinting machine, an LS/1100 Live Scan, will make it possible for members of the community to be fingerprinted when necessary without having to go through the Union County Detention Center to the jail’s booking area.
“Right now, you have to go all the way back to the booking, where we process the inmates that come in,” he said. “That’s a safety and security issue and it’s going to be more convenient for the public and even more beneficial for our employees.”
He said there are a variety of reasons a member of the general public may get fingerprinted; for example, in Arkansas, teachers must be fingerprinted in order to have their backgrounds checked before employment.
“At the fair, or at the Expo like we were the other week, we can set it up and fingerprint children. They’ve got a lot of these kid’s ID kits, stuff like that,” he said.
When a child is digitally fingerprinted, their information can be stored in the National Crime Information Center database; if a child goes missing, having their fingerprints on file can help to locate them. Roberts said he thinks having the portable machine and making that service more accessible will be positive for the community.
An LS/1100 Live Scan machine was donated several years ago to the El Dorado Police Department. Public information officer Lt. Chris Lutman said the machine was donated by Murphy Oil, as their employees are fingerprinted by the EPD.
“All their employees, we fingerprint a bunch of them and we have to re-fingerprint them all the time,” he said. “So when it’s done digitally, all we have to do is a name search and change the date and re-print. … A lot of people think it goes to a … national database, but that’s not the case. It’s all in-house.”
The LS/1100 system will be placed in the Sheriff’s Office, across the hall from the jail. Generally, the machine will only be used for members of the public. Roberts said it may also come in handy at hectic crime scenes.
Fingerprints can be sent to state and federal law enforcement agencies immediately, so if the machine is used at a crime scene, the rap sheets of any suspects fingerprinted will be returned in minutes.
The UCSO won’t use fingerprints taken for a person’s employment against them, though, Roberts said.
“We do not check for criminal histories,” he said. “If we find prints at a crime scene, we send the prints to the crime lab and depending on the crime (not all crimes) then the lab will run the prints through the national database for comparison. The LS/1100 is for prints only and does not allow print comparison.”
The purpose of the new machine is for public use, he said. The only difference in UCSO operations will be that those needing to be fingerprinted will no longer have to walk through the jail, Roberts said.
“It’ll help us out quite a bit, in different ways, different aspects of our job,” Roberts said.
Caitlan Butler can be reached at 870-862-6611 or [email protected].