Scottish Government

Annex

1. The Scottish Fingerprint Service provides a national fingerprint identification service and maintains the national fingerprint and palm print collection. The Service also provides expert witnesses and a national scene of crime mark search facility.

2. The Scottish Fingerprint Service is currently a component of SCRO, which is a common police service providing, in addition to fingerprints, intelligence support, criminal justice information, IT and disclosure services to the criminal justice community.

3. The current four bureaux national structure, with facilities in Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dundee and Edinburgh was established in 2001, following HMIC's Primary Inspection of the SCRO Fingerprint Bureau in 2000. Before this Scottish Police Forces maintained seven largely autonomous fingerprint bureaux, with Strathclyde Police providing a fingerprint capability for Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary. In addition to the rationalisation of bureaux, a Head of the Scottish Fingerprint Service was appointed in 2001. This individual also serves as Head of the Glasgow Fingerprint Bureau based within SCRO.

4. The staffing structure of the Scottish Fingerprint Service is outlined in Table 1 below.

Table 1

* actual establishment as of end March 2006
1 vacancy, covered currently by an expert.
2 in addition, a further fingerprint officer provides cover for 6 hours per week