The FBI has many ways of solving these
crimes and finding the criminals. One of them is through fingerprint
identification.
 Fingerprints
are a great way to tell people apart because everyone's fingerprints
are unique. This means that no two people in the world have the
same fingerprints! Other ways of identifying people (hair color,
height, weight, and eye color) may change as a person gets older,
but fingerprints stay the same.
 There are over 250
million sets of fingerprint records on file. If all of the fingerprint
cards on file were stacked on top of one another, they would
equal one hundred and thirty three stacks, each the size of the
Empire State Building! Finding space to keep all of these fingerprint
cards is difficult! This is one of the reasons that the FBI is
now putting the cards in digital format so that the images can
be stored on computers. All fingerprint cards at the FBI are
eight-inch squares (a little smaller than a piece of notebook
paper) and are thinner than a piece of cardboard. The FBI gets
over 37,000 of these fingerprint cards each day, seven days a
week! Thirty-two percent of these cards now come to the FBI as
digital images. Here's an example of a FBI applicant fingerprint
card. You can click on the picture and print it out.
 
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