Pinal County keeping an ‘eye’ on inmates, criminals

Sheriff Paul Babeu announced this week that the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office will be the first in Arizona to implement innovative iris biometric identification technology to improve public safety.

“The remarkable technology we are implementing will be used to enroll and positively identify every inmate at the 1,500-bed Pinal County Jail. It will also be used to register, track and monitor more the 700 convicted sex offenders in Pinal County,” said Babeu.

In addition the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office intends to implement the technology in the field to enable patrol deputies, detectives and SWAT members to verify the identity, and quickly access criminal backgrounds and risk information, of suspects using a hand held, wireless and multi-modal biometric device operating on a Smartphone. This means that sworn deputies will be able to use iris, fingerprint and facial recognition biometric identification technology virtually anywhere.

“Pinal County is the fastest growing county in all of America. Unfortunately, because of our unique location between Phoenix and Tucson, Pinal County is also the ‘Number One Pass through County for Drug and Human Trafficking in all of America.’ This reality presents an extraordinary challenge for all of our sworn personnel,” Babeu said.

“We can no longer wait for the federal government to take action to secure our borders,” Babeu said. “To protect our citizens, it has now become the job of my office to directly engage those responsible for drug and human trafficking. We are conducting operations on a weekly basis to dismantle and disrupt drug and human trafficking operations – and reduce the crimes associated with their activity. The implementation of these remarkable biometric identification technologies is another step in our efforts.”

“Many of the criminals we deal with, particularly those associated with the drug cartels, are very mobile and very well-financed. They are part of an extensive network and frequently operate under many identities and aliases. This technology will enable us to quickly determine if they have been entered into the system in another participating jurisdiction, where they have been arrested and convicted before, as well their criminal backgrounds and associations.”

The new iris biometric systems are integrated with existing jail management and sex offender systems, which eliminates unnecessary costs and redundant – and potentially inaccurate – re-typing of information. The technology also enables the sheriff’s office to share data with other authorized law enforcement agencies across the nation by positively identifying individuals – and accessing their criminal information –in a matter of seconds.

Additional information regarding the iris biometric technology can be obtained by contacting Sean Mullin at BI2 Technologies at 617-803-1644.  

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