That's What Fingerprint Is For

Question for Indonesia citizen:
“How sure Police will solve the case when you lost your belonging?”
For example: burglary in the house, burglary in the shop, laptop is stole in the office, and motorcycle is gone in the garage. Dealing with police administration will make you dizzy, especially after having a bad day. Let’s say we put hope 5% by reporting to the police station, the rest of it would be let this thing go. Term 5% hope doesn’t mean the police will intentionally find the criminal, but merely administration procedure. Perhaps someday a guy come to the police station and confess has robbed some house including your house then the police will inform you later. Or a police find a wreck motorcycle on the street which is your motorcycle that has been stolen 5 years ago.

Find the suspect who responsible for this lost is a problem. The civil citizen certainly cannot solve it because they don’t have any access but police have it. They got the skill, experience, data, and standard procedure. But why we still can’t depend on them to solve burglary. In my opinion, they just focus on street work by interrogating witnesses/people on the crime scene. This technique supposed to be followed by forensic evidence and record investigation. In a simple way is by collecting and analyzing the fingerprint then use fingerprint record for identification.

I’m sure there are lot of evidences can be found in the scene. The reason I’m talking about fingerprint is my curiosity when I applied Statement of Good Conduct (Indonesian: Surat Keterangan Berkelakuan Baik) in Police station. The officer took my fingerprint as record. They must have enormous fingerprint database because they took fingerprint to each people who apply for driver license, statement of good conduct, commit felonies/misdemeanors, or join armed force.
But is this database useful for the interest of citizen? Can we gain the real benefit of fingerprint database? Can we close burglary case based on fingerprint database? Because burglary is the top ten cases reported by citizen.

I hope in every burglary case, fingerprint identification is strictly performed as a protocol. If there’s no fingerprint match on database then we can maintain this record for the next investigation. Perhaps we found some pattern by tracking this unidentified fingerprint. At least we try to do something instead of do nothing. The more data collected the easier to investigate the case to closure.

Some people might say,”Fingerprint identification is not worth for burglary. It exclusively performed for homicide or terrorist”. Don’t be lazy! It’s police job to protect and serve citizen, right? Isn’t it wonderful citizen put their trust to a police instead of paranormal?
What if fingerprint database is not maintained well and not supported by proper technology? This is a management issue. I hope fingerprint collection in police department is not for formality purpose. I just want to say one thing, ”We must one step ahead to catch criminal otherwise forget it”.