309_Group_P1

Position Paper – Part One

Name:

Instructions: Please use this form as an organizer for writing your portion of your group position paper. You will be writing the opening paragraphs of the paper. You should clearly and thoroughly identify the problem that you are addressing. You may use your own research and the research from other members of your group. Be sure to follow the MLA citation format that you used when completing your JRP. Your portion of the paper should be a minimum of one page in length.

I. There is a problem in society today. That problem is

The problem is that we have many crimes being committed in today society that are going unsolved and leaving families and friends with no closure. By simply implementing a finger print database on the National scale we would be able to not only solve more cases but also identify body of many victims much easier thus devoting more time to solving the crime. With a national finger print database where everyone’s finger prints will be taken at birth; it would make it much easier for police and detectives to narrow down their suspects by determining weather they were at the crime scene or not. Also by giving a police officer a finger print scanner you can narrow down the time it takes for routine traffic stops and other small crimes. The officer can have the suspect put his finger onto the scanner and within a few minutes obtain his whole background thus saving the officer and suspect time. The FBI's IAFIS database already stores millions of fugitives, terrorist, and suspects entire backgrounds on their databases, by applying fingerprint scanners at airports you could get whole backgrounds on people entering the plane. Such things like suspected terrorist can show up after the scan; which gives us the up the upper hand in preventing any possible problems that may occur. The need for records on criminals is almost unneeded if the National Fingerprint Database is applied; it will be much like IAFIS where all those records will be kept and can go back several years. This would also help us move forward in going green by saving paper and help our law enforcement become more advanced by giving them new better technology to use. Finger prints never change thus possibly solving hundreads of more cases never thought possible of solving, and it only has to be done once at birth.

II. Facts that demonstrate that there is a problem are: (You may use your own sources and the sources of the members in your group)

The latent fingerprint identification system has helped prosecutors and law enforcement teams solve more than 4,000 crimes for which there were no suspects--only a leftover fingerprint at the crime scene that could be scanned into the system. The system went online in 1989 and has more than 1.4 million fingerprint records of criminals in its **database**. Before the latent system was developed, the only way to compare prints was to call in fingerprint experts, which was done in only a handful of cases.

Since 1980 there has been 540274 murders in the United States and only 341945 have been solved, that is only 63% of all murders have been solved. Even though the amounts of murders have decreased since the 1990 there are still way to many deaths that are going unsolved. Across the United States a police officer books a suspect, stops a suspicious character near a crime, or pulls over a speeder, and takes his fingerprints. If someone is in a fingerprint database, police can find out almost immediately if that person has any outstanding warrants, is an armed felon, using a false name, or even considered very dangerous, because of this, police can save thousands of live each year just because of they were able to find the criminals information through their fingerprint.

Only 63% percent of murders have been solved since 1980, these numbers could be lowered if a national fingerprint database due to an increased amount of fingerprints to compare to. The from 1999 may be out dated in the terms that the numbers are different but the principle is still the same in that after we created an offenders database solved crimes went up. Since 1995 there are 36 unsolved murders to 0 solved ones in DuPage County alone.

Work Cited

Scigliano, Eric. "The Tide of Prints ." //SIRS//. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Feb. 2011. .

"FBI Murder Statistics." //newsnet5.com//. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Feb. 2011. .