Crime Computer Is a Help, but Can’t Do It All : Law enforcement: Despite success with fingerprint system, police lack time to check all unsolved cases.

When Los Angeles police detectives fed fingerprints from the unsolved 1963 murder of a Hollywood waitress into a police computer last month, they demonstrated just what an automated fingerprint identification system can do.

The computer searched through more than 1 million fingerprints in a flash and pulled up the name of Vernon Robinson, 45, who is now in custody in Minnesota on suspicion of the murder of Thora Rose. The Los Angeles police system is linked to the statewide Cal-ID computer, which is run by the state Department of Justice. In five years, that system has helped identify Richard Ramirez as the Night Stalker, and matched about 30,000 other fingerprints from crimes with prints already in police files.

For all of their successes, however, experts say that the computer systems are unlikely to close the books on hundreds of unsolved murders statewide. Even assuming that the computer is infallible and untiring, it is heavily dependent on human time and expertise--and fingerprints alone may not be enough to get a conviction.

The Minneapolis attorney representing Robinson alleges, in fact, that the system has erred in identifying his client, who contends that he was in Navy basic training in San Diego at the time of the murder on Oct. 3, 1963.

“The laser system spotted a possible comparison, but a person manually matched my client’s prints,” said Robert H. Meier. “And, as we all know, human beings make errors.”

But Hollywood Division Detective Mike McDonagh denies that there was a mistake. From its database, a computer pulled several suspects whose prints were similar to those found at Rose’s apartment, he said, and an expert criminalist selected Robinson’s as the exact match.

“We don’t just have one print--we have 10 (matching) prints,” McDonagh said. “The analyst would have to have been wrong on all of them.”

The prints were taken from louver windows that the assailant removed from the waitress’ apartment to gain entrance, he said.

Police have not disclosed whether there is any other evidence linking Robinson to the killing.

McDonagh said he has already received calls from the relatives of past murder victims asking that their cases be run through the computer. However, he said, the Los Angeles Police Department simply does not have the manpower to pull every unsolved case from its archives, check for viable fingerprints, and go through the process that makes those prints computer-ready.

Until the automated system was put in place, detectives often spent hundreds of hours questioning witnesses in the field in an effort to identify suspects. Then they would ask fingerprint technicians to compare the prints of those suspects to ones from the crime scene.

Police working on the Rose case in 1963 reviewed over 30,000 sets of prints by hand in Sacramento, McDonagh said.

The statewide computer can search for a match to a crime-scene print in 15 minutes. It does 280 such searches a day and has turned up 30,000 matches, most involving burglaries, according to Gary Cooper, who manages Cal-ID for the state Department of Justice.

Even more routinely, Cooper said, Cal-ID aids authorities by checking to see that people arrested for serious crimes do not outwit the system by using aliases.

Every time someone is arrested for a serious offense in California, his or her fingerprint card is electronically fed into the system. With arrests by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, for instance, the print card is sent by facsimile machine to department headquarters downtown.

There, technicians blow it up and trace it to remove temporary imperfections, which can be caused by fingertip cuts, for example. They feed the prints to the computer in a series of geometric equations that correspond to configurations that are believed to be unique for each person.

The computer compares the prints to those of 7 million people, the vast majority of whom have been arrested for serious crimes. Others are applicants for various state licenses and police positions.

When the system went on-line, Cooper said, officials ran prints from 400 unsolved Northern California homicides and matched prints with suspects in 75 of these cases, leading to 39 arrests.

Joseph P. Bonino, commanding officer of the Police Department’s records and identification division, said the Police Department system, which contains prints from arrests made by Los Angeles police but can link up to the state computer, has led to suspects in more then 5,000 crimes.

The department is developing priorities on which unsolved cases to feed into the system, he said. “Certain policy questions are involved here,” he said. “How much staff time should be devoted to cases going back to the ‘30s? Could we even find witnesses to prosecute such cases if we did get a match?”