"We have in our county jail used digital fingerprint imaging for a few years and have been linked to the Washington state database," Bales said. "But what we were finding was we were still only capturing fingerprints, and our fingerprint investigators were telling us we were missing a huge opportunity for identifications. That was because what our deputies and police officers in surrounding cities and our investigators were recovering at crime scenes was a lot of rich detail from the other parts of the hand. And we simply didn't have the technology to make those identifications because there was no central database to compare against when we collected those latent [prints]. So we knew that we really wanted to ... start creating a database and collecting full hand images."

Bales said the county also saw a way to update the old ink-and-paper process used to collect fingerprints for occupation and firearms licenses.

"We had to scan those documents into the database; It was a very time-consuming process, and the types of files it created weren't the most efficient," Bales said. "So we saw the opportunity to update that process as well and integrate a full-hand scanning technology into the regional AFIS. What we were looking for was a full-hand, small AFIS system that we could implement ... in each of the three jails in Snohomish County," he said

Cross Match's Livescan system met the county's needs, he said.

Bales said the sheriff's department is now rolling out the system, which should be fully operational by early summer.