The FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Division’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) provides the Forensic Lab an opportunity to search three latent fingerprints per day against the largest criminal fingerprint repository in the world, which contains more that 35 million individual’s known fingerprints. IAFIS is primarily a ten-print system for searching an individual’s fingerprints to determine whether a prior arrest record exists and then maintaining a criminal arrest record history for each individual. This system offers significant latent print capabilities. Using IAFIS, a latent print specialist can digitally capture latent print and ten-print images and perform several functions with each.

These include:

• enhancement to improve image quality
• comparison of latent fingerprints against the ten-print records retrieved from the criminal fingerprint repository
• searches of latent fingerprints against the ten-print fingerprint repository when no suspects have been developed
• automatic searches of new arrest ten-print records against an unsolved latent fingerprint repository
• and creation of special files of ten-print records in support of major criminal investigations.

The Forensic Lab is authorized to search three latent fingerprints/day against IAFIS after unsuccessful AFIS/MAFIN identification. Latent fingerprints searched against IAFIS by the SD State Forensic Lab are prioritized according to seriousness of criminal activity.