Police to set up national shoe print register
Finnish police plan to set up an archive of copies of shoe prints during the remainder of the present year. The National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) believe that the shoe print register, to be set up alongside the national fingerprint and DNA registers, will help solve burglaries and thefts.
The NBI has been planning on a national shoe print register already since the 1990s, and for the past few years, it has been working on the right kind of programme for the purpose. Now it is ready.
In the future, pictures of shoe prints are to be placed in an NBI electronic database, to which police departments around the country will have access.
“As far as I know, no other country has such a networked footwear print register in use. Individual PC systems exist, but they are on a small scale”, says Kimmo Himberg, head of the NBI’s crime laboratory.
Police in Finland have long taken shoe prints at crime scenes, and used them as evidence in court, but most prints have remained unrecorded electronically for further use.
Only a few large police units around Finland have set up databases of shoe prints for their own use. The information in these local databases is to be brought together to form the foundation of the new national register.
“There are, perhaps, a few hundred shoe prints - at most a few thousand”, Himberg says.
Police are being taught to use the new register. Not all local police forces are sure if it is worth giving employees who already have a very heavy workload the additional task of transferring crime scene evidence that they have collected into a register.
The benefits of a shoe print register are reduced by the fact that a criminal can simply discard the shoes used during the crime. However, a fingerprint or DNA trace can be used to track down a criminal decades after the crime.
Himberg believes that police will use the new shoe print register mainly in investigating theft and other property crime. It can also be used in the investigation of homicides.
Helsingin Sanomat
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| 27.5.2008 - TODAY |
 Police to set up national shoe print register |
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