Vanguard Magazine

14 AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2022 www.vanguardcanada.com TECHNOLOGY 131 YEARS OLD AND JUST GETTING WARMED UP NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN FINGERPRINTING HAVE ALWAYS COME FROM CANADA BY VANGUARD STAFF FINGERPRINTING: W hile evidence suggests fingerprinting was used for identification pur- poses during China's Qin Dynasty (~300 B.C.), the first documented use of fingerprinting for law enforcement was in 1891 by Juan Vucetich, head of the bureau of Anthropo- metric Identification at the Central Police Department in La Plata, Argentina. After that, it only took 20 years for the RCMP to set up the Fingerprint Bu- reau in 1911. Three years later, in 1914, North America's first forensic lab opened in Montreal. The then-revolutionary facil- ity inspired many others to build their own, including the US Bureau of Investigation, which later became the FBI. In 1924, they opened an Identification Division for ac- cepting and collecting fingerprints for law enforcement services across the country. Since then, fingerprints have been the cor- nerstone of forensic science and the easiest way to catalog people, suspects or inmates, keep records of public employees and per- form security checks on private citizens. And this doesn't seem to be changing, despite the significant strides in forensic and identification science related to DNA. "I have long thought fingerprinting will become obsolete when law enforcement agencies stop maintaining fingerprint data- bases and concentrate on DNA data-bases," says Simon A. Cole, professor of criminol- ogy and law at the University of California at Irvine. "That has not happened yet." And according to Professor Jennifer Mnookin, former dean at the UCLA School of Law, it probably won't any time soon. "Human gene editing or biochips may eventually change our idea of the human self in meaningful ways, but fingerprint evidence is about something much more mundane: was this body, this finger, this person at the scene of the crime? For this reason, it is likely to remain important." Today another Canadian company is changing fingerprint technology On a recent episode of Vanguard Radio, host J. Richard Jones sat down with Paul Guindon, CEO of Commissionaires, the only national not-for-profit security com- pany. It was formed in 1925 as an employer of veterans upon their return from WW1. The bulk of their discussion centred on the next iteration of taking, cataloging, and using fingerprints. "Around 2006, the RCMP was experi- encing huge backlogs in processing ink and roll fingerprints," said Mr. Guindon. "It was taking weeks or sometimes months to get feedback on a set of fingerprints. They decided on technology as a way to address this, chose Commissionaires to pi- lot the project and made us the first com- pany to be certified outside of the RCMP to offer digital fingerprints." Instead of traditional ink and roll finger- printing that was the default way to collect fingerprints up to that point, Commission- aires rolled out digital fingerprint tech- nology that processed a full set of prints in about 15 minutes. But more than that, it could immediately be run through the entire RCMP database and return results within hours versus weeks or months. It was a huge success across the board, and especially in the private sector. In the past, with background checks po- tentially taking multiple weeks to complete, employers and their new hires could get stuck in holding patterns with unfortunate PAUL GUINDON CEO OF COMMISSIONAIRES

• Cover