The National Automated Fingerprint Identification System (NAFIS) helps Australian law enforcement agencies to solve crimes by matching crime scene evidence to persons of interest and identifying individuals from their fingerprints or palm prints. The NAFIS is the only system of its type in Australia. It is available 24/7 and is searched on average more than 4,000 times per day by Australian law enforcement agencies.

The NAFIS enables near real-time uploads of prints from crime scenes, helping police to identify suspects in minutes, and link that identity to existing warnings, warrants or associated criminal activity information held within other police information reference systems.

While most identifications are for volume crimes such as unlawful entry to homes and car thefts, the system also assists police to identify suspects for more serious crimes such as murder, rape and armed robbery.

The NAFIS holds:

• TenPrint data – finger and palm print images collected from individuals by Australian police and immigration authorities, along with corresponding basic biographic information.
• Latent data – unsolved finger and palm print impressions recovered from crime scenes, which Australian police can search against.

There are more than 12.5 million fingerprint sets for just over 7 million individuals stored in the system – as some individuals are printed on multiple occasions.

Our fingerprint matching results have significantly improved the ability of police to solve major and minor crime across Australia by identifying a link between a person of interest and forensic evidence. This leads to reduced investigation time and successful prosecutions due to accurate identification of individuals.

NAFIS NextGen

NAFIS NextGen will allow law enforcement agencies across Australia to use our biometric services to help solve crime and keep our community safe.

NAFIS NextGen will allow us to deliver an upgraded, fully supported system, with protected government cloud capability, advanced latent fingerprint processing and integration with partner agency systems. It will also offer a new range of capabilities, such as flexible access to enable experts to work from a wider variety of locations, increased automation of standard tasks to free up experts for higher-value work, and a long-term technical support arrangement to ensure that the capability is kept up to date and available into the future.

The system will be implemented in mid-2023 with continual upgrades occurring until the planned project completion in 2025.

The National Criminal Investigation DNA Database (NCIDD) holds more than 1.6 million DNA profiles that have been uploaded by Australian police from crime scenes, convicted offenders, suspects, volunteers, items belonging to missing persons and unknown human remains.

The NCIDD provides police the intelligence they need to solve crime by linking DNA profiles obtained from crime scenes with profiles from convicted offenders, suspects, volunteers, items belonging to missing persons and unknown human remains throughout Australia. The database also allows police to match profiles from 2 or more unsolved crime scenes, linking seemingly unrelated police investigations.

DNA evidence has been used to implicate criminals in serious offences such as sexual assault, armed robbery and murder, as well as helping to solve many high-volume crimes such as burglary. Just as importantly, DNA has established the innocence of many people who might otherwise be suspects for a crime.

The NCIDD also provides police with familial searching and kinship matching capabilities. This relatively new technology is particularly useful for assisting police with missing persons investigations.

We encourage anyone who has a missing family member and who would like to provide their DNA profile to assist in the missing person investigation to contact their state or territory police missing persons unit.

The ACIC works with police agencies to ensure NCIDD operate in accordance with Commonwealth, state and territory legislation governing collection and matching of DNA profiles.

The National Missing Persons and Victim System (NMPVS) provides Australian police with the ability to undertake national searches on long-term missing persons and unidentified human remains.

The NMPVS is also used by Australian and New Zealand police for identifying the victims of disasters.