CRIME-FIGHTING DEVICE OF THE WEEK: THE SHOE SCANNER
by Hazed
A new machine could help police to catch burglars by capturing and storing the shoe-prints of suspects.
The new shoe scanner is being used in a police station in north London, where it’s been a huge success, nabbing 71 burglars in the past eight months.
Police have known that everybody’s shoe print is unique for a long time, but they haven’t had any way to process them. “Historically, prints were taken with paper and ink,” says Constable Jason Hall, who has been working with the Colindale scanner for eight months. “Then you’d send them off to the central database where they’d be entered manually. The whole process would take between three and five days, by which point a lot of suspects would be out on bail or released.”
Now with the shoe scanner officers can automate the process and put about 70% of suspects through the system, compared to 3% previously. The scanner was the idea of a police sergeant at Colindale station, Julie Henderson, who came up with the idea of connecting a scanner to the database.
The plan is to roll the scanners out to other London stations over the next year, then nationally, and the Metropolitan police force are also talking to other countries such as the US.
