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I am sorry to hear about the burglary. There may be an excuse for the police taking so long but it is not going to be good. Make sure that if any of you are in the same situation you specify that you think there is someone in the house right now. If you say you came home and found it broken into, they will assume the burglars are long gone and handle it as a report, which is much lower priority. If you think someone is in there still, it becomes burglars in action, which is usually a hot call.

Also, if the agency has a policy of not taking fingerprints in residential burglaries, you need to work on getting this changed. Write the Chief, and if that does not get it changed, then go up the chain to the city manager, mayor, and city council. This is a denial of the service you pay for and is inexcusable.

Having said that, I want to also caution that there will be many times you do not want things printed. It is very hard to get prints off many surfaces (though it is getting better with technology). If the odds of getting a good print are slim, you might not want the powder mess that goes with it.

One good example of something that should very rarely be printed is your car. In the case of a break-in, there is very little that will take a good print inside the car, and prints outside the car are not good evidence. And, the powder is designed to stick to surfaces and is really hard to clean up. Believe me, you don't want the inside of the car printed for minor burglaries. Stolen cars are a little different because there is one place we almost always get good prints from. Everyone reaches up and readjusts the rear view mirror, even the thief does this without thinking about it. This will almost always give us prints from the back of the inside mirror.

And, in most decent cities, we are finally getting tot he stage of Joe Friday in the 60's. We can solve a crime from a single print, or even a large enough fragment of one. Computers do the searching now and are very good at picking matches for the examiner to verify as the suspect. Small towns may not be able to afford it yet, but big cities have the $2.5 million that automated fingerprint services cost to set up.