The Netherlands is giving U.S. authorities access to the Dutch criminal database. This is a database containing more than 6,000,000 fingerprints of 1,500,000 convicts and suspects.
In addition to the US, the UK has also applied to link with The Automated Fingerprinting System Dutch Kollektie (HAVANK). Twenty other countries already have access to it. About 150,000 fingerprints per year are recorded and entered into HAVANK. These are fingerprints of suspects of a crime on remand. It also involves people who refused to identify themselves. Forty percent of these were not previously registered. The police are permitted to use these fingerprints for the prevention, detection, prosecution and trial of crimes and for the identification of unknown corpses.
Each year the police compare about 8,000 crime scene traces with fingerprints in the HAVANK database. "In an average of about 20 to 25 percent of the cases, we find the person whose fingerprints they belong to," said John Riemen of the police department. When police do not find a match in HAVANK, they can search foreign databases. The large number of fingerprints in the database can be explained by the long retention periods and the amount of arrests. Fingerprints of people who are no longer suspects must eventually be removed. This does not apply to people who have been convicted. By law, the police may remove fingerprints only by order of the Judicial Information Service (Justid).
