What your county gains by joining.

A single Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS), which matches fingerprints and identifies an unknown subject, is operated for the partnership. It gives every member better data than any county could assemble alone, at a fraction of the cost of starting up its own system. Each member's prints are searchable by every partner, so a positive identification is far more likely than against any single county's records. The answer also arrives with the urgency it deserves: when an unknown subject is wanted for a violent crime two counties over, the officer in the field should know immediately.

The data stays yours. Counties retain ownership of their data; the database is shared. A stake in the system gives your county the freedom big agencies have always had. That is because a local ABIS is the foundation on which the rest is built: touchless capture, mobile identification, and applications built on data your county controls.

The record runs deep. Cal-RIDG ingested 1.2 million hard-card arrest prints into the shared system. These records predate electronic livescan and date back to the 1960s. For a cold case involving a subject never printed electronically, the hit may already be waiting.

The record is more than prints. The shared platform also manages booking photos: mugshot capture and scars, marks, and tattoos (SMT). These are searchable by any authorized member from a standard web browser, with role-based access and a timestamped audit trail. Investigators build photo lineups on-screen and conduct secure witness viewings using the same records. Facial recognition, integrated with the booking record, returns candidate lists for trained review. Note: candidates returned by facial recognition are investigative leads, not identifications on their own.

Joining is guided end to end. Cal-RIDG works with each county through onboarding, from VPN and firewall configuration to system integration. The system itself is evergreen: always advancing, and shaped by the counties in it. Counties joining now are setting its direction.

Fingerprints recovered from crime scenes, known as latent prints, require a qualified examiner before they can be used to make an identification. For agencies without their own examiners, that has meant a statewide queue that can run up to a year or longer. The alternative was to hire, train, and retain a latent unit: a minimum of two qualified examiners, a commitment many county budgets cannot sustain.

The partnership opens a third path: member agencies with examiner capacity to spare put it to work on each other's cases. Your casework is examined by experienced latent print examiners with a much faster turnaround and searched against the shared system's full breadth of member data. This exchange is already underway today, across a range of case types and complexities.

The paperwork is as straightforward as the arrangement: latent casework is governed by a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between your agency and the partnership, with a fixed per-case rate. Cal-RIDG is always available to walk you through the process.

Cal-RIDG deploys, trains on, and supports Evolution mobile identification devices: smartphones in rugged cases with integrated fingerprint and facial scanners. Because the shared ABIS is local, Cal-RIDG returns a hit or no-hit in as little as a few seconds, with statewide and federal responses following.

Officers train in minutes, not days. Built-in cellular service lets the device work away from the patrol vehicle: at the door, on the trail, in the field. Every device complies with the FBI Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Security Policy and uses multi-factor authentication to protect sensitive data. Feedback from the field has been overwhelmingly positive, with agencies requesting additional units after the first deployment.