Minnesota DoJ Uses Biometrics Streamlining Security, Paperwork

When the Minnesota Department of Justice began its eCharging program, the goals were to streamline workflows and to reduce the amount of paperwork between law enforcement agents in the field and the court system. Paperwork backlogs adversely affected productivity, and law enforcement officers in the field received the added benefit of not having to key in unique user ID and password combination for 10-12 different law enforcement databases that they regularly accessed from laptops in squad cars.

"Biometrics seemed a logical direction to pursue," said Justice Department's project manager, Tom Miller. "We had mounting paperwork on criminal charges, and many areas where data entry was being duplicated. Most of the paperwork required signatures and was just being transferred from department to department to get signoffs. It occurred to us that an alternate unique signoff method, like a biometric fingerprint, could electronically suffice for a signature and dramatically optimize our workflows while reducing our pain points."

Minnesota Justice Department's move to biometrics was nothing new. The FBI and Homeland Security have widely used biometrics for years. Educational institutions, pharmaceutical companies, financial services organizations and healthcare also use biometrics for purposes of records identification and personal security. "From an IT standpoint, biometrics is an established technology and can be straightforward to implement because it integrates with virtually every computing hardware and software platform out there," said Michael DePasquale, CEO of BIO-Key, Minnesota Justice's biometrics provider. "This makes it easy to replace older security methodologies such as user IDs and passwords that use two-factor authentication."

Minnesota Justice's IT Lead, Kyle Jacobson, agrees. "We really didn't encounter many integration issues with biometrics," said Jacobson. "There were a few challenges on the client-side where we found we needed to install ActiveX controls, but that was all." The other potential area of technical impact--storage--was also largely unaffected, because the biometrics are reduced from an image by algorithms into a file of mathematical expressions that capture the "equation" of the fingerprint. These arithmetic files are what is actually matched against when officers scan their fingerprints into the readers on their laptops. The files are further compressed before they are stored.

"With the technology issues being manageable, I'd have to say that if we encountered anything, it was user acceptance issues of the new technology when we began to roll it out," said Tom Miller. "There were initial concerns among our law enforcement officers that the new process using biometrics was going to be too complex. Even though they had to write down and remember ten or twelve different user IDs and passwords for the databases that they accessed daily in the field, officers were used to getting access this way--and not comfortable about having to change the way they worked.Once they saw how easy biometrics was, and that all they had to do was place their fingers on a reader, they really got excited about it." The excitement over unified, biometric access to multiple systems now presents Miller and Minnesota Justice's IT with another "problem" that is nice to have: a line forming among prosecutors and court personnel for biometrics, because they now all want it. Minnesota Justice's biometrics implementation, which began with pilot projects in four counties (St. Louis, Olmstead, Kandiyohi and Carver), is projected to be statewide by 2014, with the department bringing on two new counties with biometrics each month.

"So far, implementation has been straightforward because we have been working with smaller agencies in less populated counties, and all of these people know what each other is working on," said Miller. "It has allowed us to make sure that nothing gets dropped as we move security and document signings to biometrics." Later, when Minnesota Justice implements large metropolitan counties with multiple precincts like Ramsay (St. Paul) and Hennepin (Minneapolis), the project is bound to become more complex--but by then, the department will have the project knowledge and best practices down.

There were a few surprises, like the higher cost of biometric readers ($40 each), and the need for IT to version-track software on client machines to ensure that the correct sets of software drivers were in place for biometrics devices, but biometrics is working, and the technology rollout is on schedule."I'm pleased with how biometrics has worked for us," said Miller. "It's literally changed both the way I work and how I think about work."