MONTEGO BAY, St James – Assistant Commissioner of Police Leslie Green says the automated palm and fingerprint system used by the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) to capture fingerprints was the best in the world, but at the same time said the force was lagging behind in use of technology.

“.It is the latest version and we are now very much at the front of that process worldwide. What we need to do is make sure that we maintain that lead and that we utilise the new system effectively”.

More than 230,000 fingerprints of convicted persons have been stored on the system, said Green, who has responsibility for serious and organised crimes.

But, despite being ahead in this area, the assistant commissioner of police said the JCF was behind most international police forces in the use of technology.

“…There are a lot of grounds for us to make up. I think one has to look at where we are in the world in relation to policing in Jamaica, and, unfortunately, we are a long, long way behind. If you turn on your television on any night you will see how well equipped and how well resourced police forces are in other parts of the world”.

The assistant commissioner of police, who was addressing the Rotary Club of Montego Bay weekly luncheon at Sandals Montego Bay on Tuesday, said the JCF was still relying on the use of black and white film photography for pictures of crime scenes.

“Film photography has moved on immensely. and we are still currently using black and white photography. The actual processing of black and white photography is expensive because the paper now is sort of a specialist field and it costs an enormous amount of money to buy the paper for the processing,” he said.

He said, too, that black and white photographs prohibited forensic gathering as “when you look at a black and white you don’t know what a blood stain is or what a watermark oil stain is”.

But ACP Green announced that the JCF has recently invested $15 million for the purchase of new digital cameras for all of its senior crime officers. The cameras, he said, should be available early next year.

“So hopefully, in the early part of next year, we won’t be seeing all these guns on the front of senior officers’ desks and destroying the evidence. We will be showing it to you (members of the media) through a digital image which would have been taken at the scene of the crime and handed to the CCN and to the media houses, so that they can publish these pictures and we can retain the valuable forensic evidence that are on the firearms,” he said.

At the same time, ACP Green said Jamaica still did not have a national DNA database, which he said was available to cops in other parts of the world.