by Ronda Lickteig
R-T Staff Writer
We may not be “CSI: Grundy County” yet, but the Grundy County Sheriff’s Department has taken a major step forward technologically with the recent introduction of a new biometric ID system that uses images of the iris and facial examination.
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The system, according to Grundy County Sheriff Rodney Herring, takes digital images of the iris, which is the colored ring around the eye.
“We have tethered goggles that we place up to the face,” Sheriff Herring said. “It takes a digital image of the left and right iris. It’s completely non-intrusive. There is no laser or anything like that that is shot into the eye. It just takes a digital image of it.”
Thanks to a process called “chaotic morphogenesis,” which begins in utero and continues for the first couple of years, the iris is unique to not only each person, but also from the left eye to the right eye.
“People don’t realize that there are 240 individual identifiers in each iris,” Sheriff Herring said.
He said the iris system is faster than using a fingerprinting system, which compares loops, whirls and arches to determine a match, and is just as reliable. The iris image can be submitted to a server at the Cole County Sheriff’s Department in Jefferson City and results will be back in about 20 seconds. Fingerprints take about 30 minutes to get a determination of a match.
Herring said the iris identification technology was first developed by optometrists, who developed an algorithm that has resulted in the system. It has been used by the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq to help identify insurgents.
In addition to the iris, the department has obtained a facial examination workstation allowing it to submit mug shots to the statewide database and compare items such as the measurement between certain features to determine a match to a known person. Herring said his office could use the face seen on a video of a robbery and submit it to the system for a possible match. He could even compare something like an old yearbook photo to a video taken today and determine if it is a likely match.
Missouri will be the first state in the U.S. to have a statewide data base. The push to get the system began in 2007, when a few sheriffs involved in the Missouri Sheriff’s Association applied for grants to fund the system, which is being implemented in stages. Stage One, of which Grundy County is a part, includes 34 iris systems and 18 facial examination workstations. Sixteen counties, including Grundy, received both, with Grundy County being the only one in north Missouri to be included in the first stage. It will probably take a couple of years for all 115 counties to get up and running.
Sheriff Herring said training for the system was held on Monday and all 16 inmates currently being held at the Grundy County Detention Center, have been entered into the system. The Missouri Department of Corrections has “dumped” all of its offender mugshots into the system as well.