Fingerpainting at the Precinct
by The IMC (imc@kingcontent.com)
I will never admit to being a smart man, and, if anything, I have spent the greater part of my life being stupid.
The most recent occurrence of my stupidity went on display at Yankee Stadium during a rain delay, when I ran across the outfield and did a slip and slide on the tarp that was protecting the infield. No sooner had my momentum died, four rain-coated security guards hauled my dumb ass off into some holding cell while the fans went wild.
I spent some time sobering up in the holding cell until I was told that I would be spending the night in jail. This, by all means, was an unhappy moment, because it meant that I would be hanging out with all of the hoodlums from the South Bronx. Great.
I was moved around from holding cell to holding cell. At one point I found myself in the 44th Precinct standing in front of an Identix machine. Identix is a private company which specializes in biometric computer systems. They make both fingerprint access devices, digital fingerprint systems, and, I suspect, those fingerprint love meters found in arcades and movie theater lobbies. They can be found on the web at www.identix.com (it's a poorly designed site.)
The Identix system is basically a Pentium box running OS/2 Warp packaged in a case that has two infrared plates and two VGA monitors. One plate is significantly larger than the other. When a "perp's" fingers are pressed on to the plates, the infrared scans the fingers and displays a real-time image of the scan on the left monitor. The right monitor displays the menu system for the Identix program.
Obviously the menu system is so easy, a cop can operate it. When they drag the perp out of the holding cell, the arresting officer types in the case ID number and other relevant data. Some of my information was already entered and was called up when Officer Dumbass typed in my case ID. He had to enter his name and what I was being charged with.
The menu monitor then instructed the slow-witted law enforcement officer to press down my four fingers on the large pad, then my thumb on the small pad. Then each individual finger was scanned. The process was repeated for both hands. Later, after all fingers were scanned, the program checked to make sure that it could match the individual fingerprints with the aggregate fingerprint of all four fingers. Once verified, the officer can press F8 and send the fingerprints into the NYPD criminal database.
It was my luck that when the officer pressed F8, the machine hung. Officer Dumbass did not know what to do, and was shitting his pants thinking that he had really flicked up the whole NYPD database or something, so he gladly took my advice when I said, "Quick, hit Control-Alt-Delete!" My thinking was that maybe my prints would have been lost, and hopefully ignored.
It took the officer a while to realize that "Control" was spelled Ctrl and that he was supposed to press the buttons all at once. Upon warmboot, I stared at the screen, in handcuffs, and made some observations:
The Identix machine was running OS/2 Warp.
The machine was on an Ethernet network. It connected to a couple of file servers without the entering of any passwords.
It repeatedly tried and failed to map some fileserver to the U: drive.
It finally booted up the Identix program, which, in turn, initialized the fingerprint scanners and the second monitor.
The Identix program asked for a name and password, which was obviously precinct specific. Officer Dumbass looked around for awhile and then read the name (namis) and password (morpho) out loud as he typed them in.
Later I had to visit another Identix in another precinct because my prints came out too dark. I also had a digital picture taken of me and appended to my record.
The NYPD is still very behind the times and uses far too much paper. Thus is the reason that it takes needlessly exorbitant amounts of time to process each prisoner. I was arrested for a bullshit charge and it still took them 26 hours to get around to me. I had never been locked up before, and I was going out of my mind.
Which is why I have been thinking about Kevin Mitnick, who hasn't even been tried. Prison sucks and the plight of a prisoner is much worse than what any of us can imagine. I can bet it's even worse for a prisoner who hasn't been given a bail hearing or a trial date after three years.