King County has one of the finest and most efficient fingerprint identification systems in the country.

The Regional Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or “AFIS”, is a valuable regional service that is administered by the King County Sheriff’s Office in partnership with the Seattle Police Department. The AFIS Program’s mission is to provide timely, efficient, and quality fingerprint identification services in support of local criminal investigations through a countywide system linked to state and national fingerprint and criminal history databases.

Comparing Fingerprints in Minutes

The King County Regional AFIS Program provides identification services to the citizens and law enforcement agencies of King County.

The heart of the program is a computer system called AFIS. AFIS tracks the relationships between the ridges and minutiae of a fingerprint, compares them to over a half a million other fingerprint records, and provides a list of possible candidates or suspects in a matter of minutes.

Providing Positive Identification

The King County Regional AFIS Program is made up of much more than AFIS itself. The AFIS Program is designed to improve the ability of law enforcement agencies to identify and convict criminal offenders. It allows law enforcement representatives to respond quickly and effectively to community concerns.

The system includes a network of Livescan devices designed to capture high quality fingerprints and to transmit them electronically to AFIS for fast and accurate identification. It also provides the equipment and staff to fingerprint and identify 100 percent of the inmates that are booked into county jails. This helps to identify possible wanted or dangerous offenders before they are released.

Helping to Solve Crimes

The AFIS Program provides the technology, equipment, and staff to recover and process crime scene fingerprints. These are called latent prints. Our latent fingerprint "hit rates" — the percentage of suspects identified by our system — is nearly double the national average.

Before AFIS, a single examiner would have to work continuously for over 100 years to manually view the entire fingerprint file, and match and identify just one latent fingerprint. With AFIS, this same process takes less than 15 minutes.

Before AFIS, police had to have a suspect in mind for fingerprints to be of use. With AFIS, police are able to solve crimes with no obvious suspects. Over 6,000 suspects have been identified from crime scene fingerprints in the past five years. This has led to convictions for murders, assaults, rapes, burglaries, and other crimes.

An Effective Regional Tool

AFIS is funded through a citizen-approved levy. It is not part of the budget for either the King County Sheriff's Office or the Seattle Police Department. Funding for the Regional AFIS Program is critical to King County's crime fighting success.