Report: PA Police Fail to Fingerprint Arrestees

6ABC reports that Pennsylvania police departments are failing to fingerprint as many as 20 percent of all arrestees—and Coatesville’s police fingerprint just 33 percent of the people they arrest.

“We poured through 6 months of criminal data supplied to Action News and found at least 22,000 offenders were not fingerprinted in the first 6 months of 2013. And without a fingerprint, not a single detail of the arrests, not a mugshot, not the offenders name or the charge, no record of the arrest is added to the state’s criminal background system,” the station reported, suggesting that the failure made it easier for some criminals to evade arrest or responsibility for subsequent crimes.

Philly police, incidentally, fingerprint arrestees 99 percent of the time.