King County Sheriff

Emergency: Call 9-1-1 

King County Courthouse
516 Third Ave
Room W-150
Seattle, WA 98104
(206) 296-4155
TTY Relay: 7-1-1
sheriff@kingcounty.gov

Call (206) 296-3311 to report a neighborhood problem or a crime that is not an emergency.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AFIS professionalNot long ago, arresting officers in King County would take up to six sets of inked fingerprints of the subject in custody in order to notify each agency involved in an arrest. This was a very time-consuming process and was frustrating for police officers because every minute spent fingerprinting was one more minute not on patrol.

Fingerprint examiners used difficult and time-consuming methods of filing and searching for paper records of fingerprints in an attempt to identify criminal offenders. People detained on minor charges often lied about their identity to evade more serious felony warrants. The identification process took so long that these people were usually released before the officer ever knew they were lying. Even crime-scene prints could not be searched without a potential suspect in mind.

Live Scan Technology: The Present

This all changed with the introduction of the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) and Live Scan technology. Now fingerprints are scanned into a Live Scan fingerprint capture device and immediately transmitted over a secure network to both Seattle Police and King County Sheriff's Ten-Print Units. Liars can be identified and the information given to suburban agencies in minutes instead of days. AFIS professionalCrime scene prints can be searched against 823,000 criminal records and identified when no suspects are known. Your neighborhood is safer because of the efficiency of Live Scan.

State of the Art Technology

The King County system incorporates state-of-the-art technology that is fully accredited by the FBI to comply with the rigorous IAFIS (national AFIS database) quality specification requirements. The clearest fingerprint images possible are created by optical and lighting schemes that capture skin pore and friction ridge detail while yielding faster results and lowering rejection rates.

A Powerful Law Enforcement Tool

King County uses a fingerprint matching mainframe computer to manage its more than half a million fingerprint records. From a submitted fingerprint record, the computer creates a candidate list of possible matches for the operator to review. AFIS uses ridge counts and the relationships between fingerprint minutiae in its matching algorithm and allows even distorted prints to be accurately matched. It complies with all FBI and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) requirements for image quality.