The Police Department of Atlanta, which makes 63,000 arrests per year, is getting a new kind of weapon to catch criminals: a workflow-based biometrics system that can scan palm prints in addition to fingerprints.

“A lot of criminals will leave a palm print when they try to break into a car or door,” says Capt. Shirley Britton, chief of the Atlanta Police Deptartment. “The benefit of our new system is we can put the palm print into the system along with the fingerprints we now hold.”

The department’s new system is the NEC Integra-ID biometrics middleware application and database. It works with NEC software and biometrics scanners called the LiveScan Complete Capture-to-Booking and the Fast-ID Booking and Release Identification systems. Using the NEC Integra-ID application, the Atlanta Police Department will be able to integrate biometrics identification with other archived information, such as electronically filed court documents related to the person’s arrest.

The Integra-ID system being installed in Atlanta law enforcement locales includes 10 Fast-ID Workstations and 13 biometrics fingerprint and palm print scanners with a database system that can hold up to one million fingerprints and a half-million palm prints.

Capt. Britton said the Atlanta Police has an older NEC Automated Fingerprint Identification System. She said the older system does a good job for certain things, like checking a jailed prisoner’s fingerprints, since criminals have been known to lie about their real name. But the new system, she points out, is much more of a “personal identification system,” since it lets law enforcement pull up mug shots from back-end databases and link to documents, such as court papers, search warrants and investigative documents.