The Crime Scene Technicians (CST’s) operate the Arizona Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AZAFIS) This system serves as the central repository for fingerprint identification records relating to persons arrested throughout the state. The CST’s process fingerprints and palm prints of subjects fingerprinted for employment, arrested, or taken into custody from booking facilities throughout the city. These fingerprint images are captured electronically by a Livescan device, which creates a fingerprint record. This record is then transmitted electronically to Department of Public Safety (DPS), which passes information back and forth between different databases maintained by the Department of Justice (DOJ) during the processing of fingerprint records.

The Crime Scene Technicians process fingerprints and palm prints for the purpose of establishing positive identification and creating an individual’s criminal history record. CST’s perform quality control on images and finger sequence errors for all fingerprint records as needed. Verification is completed by a second CST on all possible matches for ten print to ten print searches. All ten print and palm print arrest records are searched through AFIS against the unsolved latent print database in an attempt to identify suspects that leave their prints at crime scenes.

AFIS Ten Print Protocols