The result comes one year after a new law allowed juvenile finger
prints to be entered in the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, a computer data base maintained by the state attorney general's Hawaii Criminal Justice Data Center.
And it comes with only 3,874 juveniles' prints in the records, about 1.6 percent of the total 237,000 arrest files, according to a release from the attorney general.
"As we get more juvenile prints into the data base, we will be able to solve more and more property crimes," said Attorney General Margery S. Bronster.
She reported that 173 juveniles were among the 620 suspects identified through prints on file in the computer fingerprint data base since last August.
Honolulu police Maj. Robert Silva said the law passed by the 1995 Legislature has improved the rate of solving property crimes. "It is common knowledge that most of the burglaries and thefts are by juveniles and young adults.
"The wider the data base, the better," said Silva, head of the police Records Division.
The computer system is a key resource, he said, but the credit for closing cases goes to humans.
"The key to success is the expertise of the technician who is doing the comparison," he said. There is a code for each feature of a fingerprint and "a key is how well they input it in the computer. The better they are, the more chance of getting hits."
And Silva said it all starts with good police work, "the beat man who knows this is the M.O. (mode of operation) of a certain person or gang. You have to have a name to compare (a print) to."
The whole system starts with officers dusting for fingerprints at every possible crime scene, he said. It can lead to linking several cases, and clearing a whole series when just one match succeeds.
A computer pad which records fingerprints from a suspect - bypassing the ink pad and paperwork files - is the state of the art in automated files, Silva said.
The Honolulu Police Department last year asked for funds for the live scan system - which could be installed in police cars as well as the booking desk - but they were cut from the budget, he said.