As you have already said, some cops do one thing, others do another. The fingerprints are destroyed and never entered into the system when they are merely cross checked. If there's a match, there's an arrest, and the prints are already on file.
Believe it or not, cops have families, live in homes, etc. We don't want our family members abused, our houses bugged/searched, illegally, or anything like that.

>Well, that's cool when it works that way - it's supposed to. I suppose with identity theft the way it is these days this probably happens a LOT more often than it used too. I'm curious though - what happens to those fingerprints if you discover that it was indeed the wrong guy? Is the innocent guy's prints now saved in a database somewhere? And is the record of an arrest kept somewhere? My guess is that even if they SAY it's deleted and not there - that it's really there - somwhere.
>I know a guy that has a big problem with stuff like this too. Some jerk stole his identity and makes a habit of writing bad checks with it. Every 2 or 3 months the cops come and arrest him for it. He even carries a printout with a picture of the culprit in his wallet now - somwhere along the line of this mess they gave him a printed copy of the fake ID the guy was using. Yet still, every couple of months he's back in jail - waving this piece of paper around explaining the whole thing all over again. Sometimes they figure it out pretty quick, other times he ends up sitting there for over a week! He's lost jobs a few times because of this. Last time they kept him for so long he missed paying rent on his apartment because he was in jail - so he lost ALL his belongings too! Every time they take him to jail he says they fingerprint him and take his picture. I'm sure that somewhere that's stored. What really gets him is that sometimes once he shows the cop the printout, they make a
> call and it's done right there. Othertimes the cop won't do anything but arrest him, refuse to check into it until AFTER he's sat in jail for at least a day or two. Meantime his whole life has been ruined.