Columbus, Ohio police just spent about $120,000 in federal homeland security grant money to buy 40 cellular-enabled fingerprint scanners which will allow officers to run a fingerprint of a suspect against 250,000 prints in the city's fingerprint database, according to the Associated Press. The department says the Rapid Identification Terminal (wi-fi enabled!) will cut down on crime since officers will no longer have to route a suspected criminal to the central office, where fingerprinting can take up to an hour. This doesn't replace that procedure but let's officers find out if the person they've stopped has outstanding warrants or may be lying about his or her identity.
Of course, the temptation is going to be for the police to use this at every opportunity. And they might have gotten a hand from a recent Supreme Court case which upheld a Nevada law that requires someone to provide identification or identify themselves verbally during a Terry stop.
Terror begets terror? I'm terrified of what "law enforcement" is going to look like another 20 years into the War on^Hf Terror.
