System Puts Criminals at Police FingertipsThe fingerprints of 10 million people who have been arrested for criminal behaviour in the past have been compiled in a computer database, which will be accessible to police in 21 provinces across the country, the China Youth Daily reported.Most of the information, which was developed by the Beijing Institute of Criminal Science, will be available through the Internet. Police used the database to solve about 1,000 criminal cases last year. Zhu Qiang, the institute's director, told China Youth Daily that 10,000 criminal cases have been solved with help from the system, and more than 100 million yuan (US$12.1 million) in economic losses have been saved. China began fingerprinting suspected criminals in the 1950s, but the method was performed by hand until the 1990s, which often resulted in low efficiency. |
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