29th November, 2004 - Sydney Morning Herald   Police use new photo system to crack cases   by LES KENNEDY

It was all over in a few seconds. The 35-year-old Campsie woman barely had time to turn and see the man bolting out the door of McDonald's in Kings Cross with her purse.

He had snatched it as she waited with her daughter to be served at 11.30am on October 13. By the time she reached the door, the man was gone.

Later, the still-shaking woman was able to give local police a vital clue.

Despite the criminal wearing a singlet she was able to see the words "Troublesome" and a Celtic cross tattooed on his back.

So Kings Cross police turned to their latest tool - the PhotoTrac digital suspect identification imaging system - and entered the descriptions.

Within seconds they had a match, a name and photographs of a man, along with photos of the tattoos that were taken while he was in custody for another matter.

A week later the man, 28, was arrested in Darlinghurst and charged with stealing. He will appear in the Downing Centre Local Court on December 12.

The arrest is among a handful of cases solved using the PhotoTrac system, which looks for matches in a databank of photographs of known criminals and also records features such as tattoos, scars, moles and their body measurements.

The Police Minister, John Watkins, said yesterday that bigger results are expected to come from the criminal identification technology, which has been deployed to 110 police stations and 36 specialist units throughout the state at a cost of $5million.

The facial recognition technology has assisted police with many investigations by comparing images of previously unknown suspects against the offender database in real time, with police also being able to identify suspects via mobile data terminals in police cars.

It also gives police the ability to create complex searches to retrieve images of possible offenders in a matter of seconds.

Mr Watkins said police can take the technology to victims - at their homes and in hospital beds - to conduct mobile photo lineups of potential offenders.

"Police have been loading 15,000 photos a day into the new system - making offender profiles more easily accessible to officers across the state," Mr Watkins said.

"NSW is the only Australian jurisdiction using digital imaging capture - and one of few internationally to adopt facial recognition on such a large scale."

The databank will eventually house 750,000 images.