Thanks to how the smartphone industry has developed, you've probably used fingerprint scanners on your phone for years.
Perhaps some of you have even become familiar with Face unlock scans. And now, the Maharashtra government is putting that tech towards security.
Earlier this week, Maharashtra became the first state in India to adopt a biometric verification database in order to solve crimes. The Mumbai police implemented the new Automated Multi-modal Biometric Identification System (AMBIS), which lets police analyse crime scene and suspect biometric data against those of known criminals in their database.
Aside from photos at various angles for facial recognition, the system has police gathering fingerprints, palm prints, and iris scans of suspects in custody. These get entered into a database centered at the Mumbai police headquarters, though it will be accessible by other Maharashtra police stations through their internal network.?
Police stations have also been provided with a portable AMBIS system, allowing them to compare prints found at a crime scene to the database. Supposedly, this system will also allow the police to compare image captures from CCTV footage to photos they have.?
The cyber department of the Mumbai police have been working on this project since 2017, and in the meantime have also been digitising old criminal records with this system. At least 6.5 lakh of them to be exact, dating all the way back to the 1950s.?
The system was trialled at a few police stations over the past few days before being officially implemented on Monday. ANd in just those four days, the Mumbai police managed to solve 85 crimes from chance prints found at crime scenes. So clearly, the system works.
The plan is to eventually expand the system to all 1160 police stations in the state's 42 districts, as well as to jails, fingerprint bureaus, and police training centres.