Conley, shown here next to the Anaheim Police Department's forensics computer systems, a long-term officer, became a forensics supervisor 13 years ago when the department was still dealing with camera film.
In 1998, when the APD first started working with digital cameras, one of the first questions Conley asked was how to store the images. About that time, a meeting with Linear Systems convinced him he needed some type of digital management system.
Conley eventually used a dramatic gesture to convince his superiors that they needed to invest in a system that would not quickly become obsolete.
"When we met, I had an 8-inch floppy disk, a 5-1/4-inch floppy disk, a Zip disk, and a couple others," he said. "I threw them all on the table and said, 'Here, pick your technology. And oh, this is no longer available, and this is no longer available.' They got the point."
Obscelence is the primary concern when going with digital audio and digital images, Conley said. "We went with DIMS because we could see that for 10 years we'd be OK," he said. "We also knew that in five years from that time, we'd need to look at this again."
The two racks to Conley's right house the APD's system for storing finger prints, the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS). The AFIS is separate from the Linear Systems' Digital Imaging Management System (DIMS) for storing digital photos, which is in the rack on the far left.
The AFIS is a proprietary system from another integrator which can hold up to 800,000 fingerprint records, and currently stores 300,000 records. Each record, which takes up about 2 Mbytes of storage, is made up of 14 images, including one roll for each of a suspect's 10 fingers, plus one "flat" of all four fingers pressed at once and a "flat" thumbprint for each hand.
