Emphasis is placed on the experience of the St. Paul Police Department. The system was funded mainly by Federal funds and aims to duplicate with electronics and computers the process whereby a trained fingerprint examiner seeks to identify a fingerprint. During its first year, the St. Paul crime laboratory made about 90 identifications of criminal suspects from latent prints found at crime scenes and solved a corresponding number of crimes, most of them burglaries. Few if any of the crimes cleared with the automated system would have been solved without it. The 90 identifications represented a 40-percent increase in productivity over the number of latent fingerprints identified by traditional manual procedures. Additional crimes were solved by investigators who followed up leads provided by the system.The Minneapolis Police Department and State Bureau of Criminal Apprehension also used the system. The system can handle many more cases than it does, but manpower must be shifted from other police activities to collect more latent fingerprints. Another way to improve the system's effectiveness is to ensure that people who have committed crimes are in the fingerprint file. A more comprehensive identification and record system is also needed at either the State or local level. Tables, a glossary, and additional recommendations are included.