New Jersey County Tracking Homeless With Biometrics [Biometrics]

Bergen County, New Jersey had an issue. They needed to keep track of the way often homeless people received services like food and shelter, but they didn’t have a reliable way of identifying them. So that they started scanning their fingerprints.

That problem’s trickier than it may well seem. Funding for the dep. of Human Services relies on getting an accurate count of ways many homeless people they serve. But since many don’t have identification, and others balk at filling out forms or sitting for interviews, a fingerprint scan is a surefire strategy to make certain everyone gets counted and nobody gets counted twice.

The county paid the San Antonio-based Fulcrum Biometrics $90,000 to develop the custom system, which coordinates finger scanners at Department of Human Services locations with the information kept by the vaguely creepy-sounding New Jersey Homeless Management Information System. It only takes a couple of seconds for the scanners to identify a private and log their visit.

So far the system has scanned some 400 homeless people inside the county, and it’s already provided some useful insights; the brand new data shows that the third week within the month is the busiest for food programs, not the last as were previously thought. Isn’t it nice when something like this ends up a good deal less nefarious than it sounds? [ GovTech ]

Image credit: Bcymet

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This post is tagged: bergen county new jersey, department of human services, filling out forms, fingerprint scan, management information system, surefire strategy