Tuesday, June 01, 1999

Thugs' mugs online

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Suspects ID'd more easily

BY JANE PRENDERGAST
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Boone Co. Deputy Daren Harris displays the department's PhotoMug software. (Patrick Reddy photo) | ZOOM |

        BURLINGTON — Bad guys and technology don't mix. The latest example: A new computerized mug shot system in Boone County that sorts pictures by any characteristic and ends the decades-old practice of hand-writing all the information and filing the photo with hundreds of others in a spiral notebook.

        The digital camera, color printer and special software allow deputies to keep better track of everyone they ar rest; to find somebody even if they know only a nickname; and to share pictures immediately with any other department.

        “Anything we can do to keep up with the criminals,” said Daren Harris, a deputy who prompted the department to acquire the system. He's an admitted computer junkie who's glad to have found another way to fight crime with technology.

        More than 140 mug shots are in the 2-month-old system, and all deputies are trained to use it.

        Deputy Harris got his first taste of what computer-aided policing can do recently on a case involving a missing child. The child had been taken by its mother and not returned, but investigators learned the mother was traveling the country following a band. Her picture was in the system for another arrest, so he e-mailed it to the police department on the campus where the band was playing.

        “She was arrested within like an hour,” he said.

        Sheriff Mike Helmig hopes the future also brings laptop computers to all his deputies' cruisers, and that the PhotoMug system can be incorporated into those. That way, a deputy serving a warrant could be absolutely sure a suspect was the correct one — he'd have the suspect's picture in his car.

        Lineups of potential suspects are easier to compile too — the computer will pick out, for example, five pictures of people who resemble the suspect. It randomly arranges the five wrong pictures with the correct one, Deputy Harris said. The random method is good, he said, in case a defense attorney tries to attack the lineup method.

       

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