The Romanian Police has purchased cutting-edge laboratory equipment for fingerprint recovery from various supports and in atypical conditions, in a Swiss-Romanian cooperation project worth 1.5 million Swiss francs, started in 2012. The Romanian Police’s contribution to the project was 225,000 Swiss francs.
The project was aimed at aligning to the European Union regulations on the exchange of fingerprint data and on the quality management in fighting terrorism and cross-border crime. It also resulted in the upgrade of Romania’s Automatic Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS), which was interfaced with the European databases for automatic data exchange.
AFIS is shared by all the county and border police inspectorates, as all have terminals allowing searches in the national database in Bucharest, which covers the European cooperation.
The system can work automatically, without human intervention, at higher transfer and reaction speeds, Police Commissioner Gabriel Taru, project manager and director of the National Criminalistics Institute told the press conference of the project that closes at end-April. According to him, the interface does not display personal data; operators only see codes and digits, although the persons they identify are known.
Individuals are identified only in the second stage, through a rogatory commission or using international cooperation channels; the Criminal Police is informed about the identification, gets the code and moves forward into the circuit of personal identification, Agerpres informs.