The Harris County Sheriff's Office operates a state of the art Automated Fingerprint Identification System more commonly referred to as A.F.I.S. Operations Center. Its mission is to provide real-time identification of defendeants charged with criminal conduct by the District Attorney of Harris County. In addition, it also provides several high tech tools utilized in criminal investigations.

The goal of the AFIS Operations Center is to provide quick and timely identifications of defendants charged with criminal conduct in Harris County at the time of arrest. This positive identification provides for better charge decisions by the District Attorney, better bonding, and probation decisions for the courts as well. The AFIS Operations Center also provides criminal investigators with state of the art identification with such items as latent print searches, palm print searches, and facial recognition from mug shots. It is the AFIS Operation's vision to achieve our goals in a manner, which is reflective of the highest standards set by the Harris County Sheriff's Office.

The Harris County AFIS Operations Venter provides identification services to the citizens and law enforcement agencies of Harris County. At the center of the program is a computer system called AFIS. AFIS tracks the relationships between the ridges and minutiae of a fingerprint, compares them to over a million other fingerprint records, and provides investigators with a list of possible candidates or suspects in a matter of minutes.

The computer system is capable of inputting, storing, and searching fingerprints of all persons arrested in Harris County at rates of thousands of prints per second. Additionally, the system is also capable of storing mug shots and palm prints of defendants. The acronym AFIS is however, misleading at times. The term identification in the AFIS acronym has been used by vendors and governmental agencies for years. However, the system does not identify prints. It searches prints and creates "candidate" lists or likely candidates. It still relies on a trained and qualified technician to examine and compare the fingerprints and make the positive identification.

The AFIS System is designed to improve the ability of law enforcement agencies to identify and convict criminal offenders. It provides the law enforcement representative with the ability to respond quickly and effectively to community concerns. The system includes a network of Live Scan devices designed to capture high quality fingerprints and to transmit them electronically to the AFIS Operations Center for fast and accurate identification. It also provies the equipment and staff to fingerprint and identify 100 percent of the inmates that are booked into the County Jail System. This also enables the identification of possible wanted and/or otherwise dangerous offenders before they are released from custody.

Helps to Solve Crimes

The Harris County AFIS Program provides the technology, equipment, and staff to recover and process crime-scene fingerprints. These are called latent prints. Before AFIS technology was available, a single examiner would have had to work continuously for over 100 years to manually view the entire fingerprint file, in order to match and identify just one latent fingerprint. With AFIS, this same process takes less than 15 minutes.

Prior to the inception of the AFIS System, law enforcement had to have a suspect in mind if the fingerprints were to be considered useful. With the FAIS, law enforcement is able to solve crimes with no obvious suspects; this capability provided for a dramatic 66% increase in the solved-crime rate. In the past five years, there have been in excess of 2,000 suspects identified from fingerprints recovered by the CSU's who processed the crime scenes. This technology has led to convictions for murders, assaults, rapes, burglaries, and other crimes.

The Sheriff's Office has entered into a new phase of the AFIS Operations. this newly implemented project is known as the Mobile AFIS Program. The Mobile AFIS provides investigators in the field with a means to enter two prints and initiate a system search of the AFIS database. Upon completion of the AFIS inquiry, the program then quickly returns the search results to the officer out on the streets.

The AFIS Operations Center processed approximately 170,000 cases per year with an average recidivism rate of approximately 65%. The recidivism rate means the identification of individuals with prior criminal records in Harris County. The System adds approximately 70,000 new prints each year. This AFIS Operations Center is staffed 24 hours a day, 365 a year.

History of AFIS

The AFIS Operations Center operates a large scale Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) to accommodate the needs of Harris County. The system was integrated by Printrack in 1991 and has expanded over the years to Harris County Sheriff's Office was the pioneer in using Live Scan Fingerprint Capture Devices that were integrated into AFIS in an effort to create a real-time identification system for law enforcement. At the time, this system was the first of its kind in the world.

In 2003, Motorola installed the latest hight tech versions. This identified Harris County as the most advanced combined identification system in the state of Texas. New features added such capabilities such as a palm print storage and identification, facial feature searches by criminal investigators, and the latest FBI standards.

Outside law enforcement agencies have the option of purchasing the necessary equipment to connect with the Harris County Sheriff's Office's AFIS Operations Center in an effort to benefit from this technology. Most important is that all the information entered into the AFIS database is centralized so all participating law encorcement agencies can share in the benefits of the availability of the information.