Greene, Fayette below state average for police fingerprinting
In 2013, almost 800 suspected criminals were not fingerprinted by police in Greene and Fayette counties, according to state records.
Most of the charges in these cases were misdemeanor offenses, although some included felonies such as sex crimes, assaults and criminal homicide.
Data provided by the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency shows that Greene County ranked 57th — or 11th-worst — of the state’s 67 counties at fingerprinting its detainees last year.
Fayette County ranked 44th in all of 2013, according to data compiled by Public Source, while Washington and Westmoreland counties ranked 46th and 59th, respectively.
Greene County is missing prints in 30 percent of its cases, while Fayette County is missing prints in 19 percent of its cases from 2013. In the last six months of 2013, Greene County police ranked sixth worst in the state, with almost 33 percent of necessary fingerprints missing.
State law requires that suspected offenders be fingerprinted within 48 hours of arrest.
Among Fayette County police departments, state police in Uniontown were responsible for half of all arrests last year. Fingerprints are on file for 86 percent of those cases, a rate that is in line with the state average.
“Our department does have regulations in place requiring our members to fingerprint those arrested for crimes,” said Trooper Stefani Plume.
“I can’t speak for other departments, but we are required to make every effort possible to fingerprint the actors when arrested or prior to the case being closed out.”
The social cost of not fingerprinting those who are arrested is not small: Without a fingerprint, a defendant has no criminal history.
That means they can’t be tracked.
Neither the court system nor other police departments have a record.
Their background check would be clean if they wanted to teach or coach in a school or daycare or work in a nursing home. Their offenses wouldn’t be on record if they wanted to buy a gun.
“The fingerprinting is what shows the number of offenses in someone’s past,” said Masontown police Chief Joe Ryan. “That particular offense that they’re not fingerprinted on does not carry into their criminal history.”
Ryan said smaller charges can become more serious if the person is a repeat offender. For instance, repeated misdemeanor theft charges can turn into a felony charge. But if there is no record of previous charges because of a lack of fingerprints, the offender cannot be punished accordingly.
“Penalties escalate relative to the number of offenses in your history. The grade of the offense isn’t accurate because the previous offense fingerprinting is not done,” Ryan said.
Compliance across Pennsylvania was about 87 percent for the last six months of 2013, slightly up from the first half of the year, according to state figures. In 2006, when the PCCD and other groups began tracking fingerprint numbers, prints were missing statewide in about a third of all cases.
Luzerne, McKean, Lawrence and Northumberland counties are the four worst when it comes to fingerprinting, with police failing to fingerprint roughly 40 percent of the people they arrest, according to the data.
Philadelphia County — by far the busiest in the state for arrests made — has the best record in the state, with nearly 100 percent of criminals being fingerprinted, a credit to a centralized booking system that won’t allow a defendant to go before a magistrate before being printed.
Uniontown police Capt. David Rutter said Fayette County began functioning similarly when Fayette County President Judge John F. Wagner Jr. issued a mandate earlier this year that requires an offender to be fingerprinted prior to a preliminary hearing. Under this new system, Rutter expects the numbers to greatly improve.
“(Compliance) was probably in the five percent range (in the past),” said Rutter, who supervises activities at the Fayette County Booking Center. “Now, we’re at the highest level of compliance as we can attain. The magistrates won’t let (offenders) have hearings until they’re fingerprinted.”
The booking center, located adjacent to the Uniontown police station on West Penn Avenue, is a 24-hour facility for officers throughout the county to bring suspected criminals for fingerprinting, photographing and arraignment.
The center utilizes an Identix LiveScan electronic fingerprinting system that connects directly to state and federal databases and allows officers to quickly view an offender’s criminal history.
“In three minutes, it will tell us who they are and what they’ve done,” said Rutter.
The data shows that Uniontown police have fingerprint records for three-quarters of the people they arrested in 2013 — a significant improvement in the compliance rate from July 2012 to December 2013.
In Masontown, police took fingerprints for about 56 percent of the applicable cases.
Of the three busiest departments in Greene County, Cumberland Township police had the worst compliance rate at 48 percent, while state police in Waynesburg and the municipal police in the borough of Waynesburg performed at consistently high rates of 84 percent and 85 percent, respectively.
Officials give many reasons for missing prints: fingerprinting centers are too far away, booking centers aren’t open 24 hours, officers or jail personnel don’t follow procedure, fingerprint cards aren’t processed properly or offenders don’t comply with a fingerprint order.
If defendants are in police custody, the officers are responsible for getting them printed.
If they are released, defendants are trusted to visit the booking office on their own.
For misdemeanors and some felonies, defendants in Pennsylvania can be charged by receiving a summons, which means they are not arrested, and the responsibility rests on the suspected criminal to be printed.
Ryan points to this procedure as a possible reason police departments can post low numbers.
The fingerprint order that comes with the summons is often ignored, he said.
“Obviously, some people are not complying.”
Ryan said that his department has used the booking center since it opened in 2011, and he praised the work that the center does to book offenders and allow his officers to get back to work quickly.
Over the past three years, the state has spent $1.78 million to train police, raise awareness and to help them purchase electronic fingerprinting machines. Many departments have improved.
But if lapses aren’t corrected, an offender could be convicted, serve time, and still not have a verifiable criminal history.
“We’re never going to get to 100 percent,” said Rutter, pointing to circumstances that make fingerprinting impossible.
“There’s always going to be people on the run or who can’t be fingerprinted. But it’s a process, and we’re always trying to improve.”
The state Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing at 10 a.m. July 23 on the state’s fingerprinting lapses.
Public Source contributed to this report, and compiled the data used for statistics. Visit the PublicSource website at www.publicsource.org