Did the police come to your primary school to take your class's finger prints?

It seems to be an awful lot of confusion around the taking a fingerprints. Fingerprints can be taken for a variety of reasons: As part of a demonstration, in which case they are given to the children or destroyed. Nobody wants to clutter up Ident1 with a load of crappy marks that are of no real interest. Have you ever seen the best efforts of a bunch of primary school children? They are horrendous quality prints. Because a crime was committed, the headteacher or Scout leader, or whoever, was consulted and the prints were taken for elimination or inclusion purposes. After elimination, they are destroyed. Sometimes, these were labelled “suspect not charged”. There is a whole raft of legislation around biometric samples and we have had it since 1984, so the idea that someone randomly wants to get all the local lads onto a database is complete nonsense and, anyway, the prints would be refused by the fingerprint bureau. We also have an ethics committee who would not allow any such bending of the rules. Sometimes we take your fingerprints because we think something horrible is going to happen to you. This is less for your protection, and more for identifying you later. If anybody honestly thinks that their fingerprints are being held unlawfully on file then they should take legal advice, starting with Google, to find out how to have them removed.