How big it is: IAFIS is the largest biometric database in the world, housing the fingerprints and criminal histories for more than 66 million subjects in the criminal master file, along with more than 25 million civil prints. Included in our criminal database are fingerprints from 73,000 known and suspected terrorists processed by the U.S. or by international law enforcement agencies who work with us.
How fast it works: The average response time for an electronic criminal fingerprint submission is about 10 minutes, while electronic civil submissions are processed within an hour and 12 minutes. IAFIS processes an average of approximately 162,000 ten-print submissions per day.
When it started: IAFIS was launched on July 28, 1999. Prior to this time, the processing of ten-print fingerprint submissions was largely a manual, labor-intensive process, taking weeks or months to process a single submission. The FBI has been the national repository for fingerprints and related criminal history data since 1924, when more than 800,000 fingerprint records from the National Bureau of Criminal Identification and Leavenworth Penitentiary were consolidated with Bureau files. The first use of computers to search fingerprint files took place in October 1980.
How to contact us: For information regarding connectivity to IAFIS or latent capabilities, contact the CJIS Division at (304) 625-2000. For questions regarding IAFIS processing, call (304) 625-5590.
