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PANAMA CITY-- The Panama City Police Department is moving forward with a new technology that will make it easier to capture fingerprints.

At Tuesday's Panama City commission meeting officials approved Panama City Police Department to use more than $10,000 of federal forfeiture funds for a fingerprint machine.

The police department will be purchasing a Cross Match Technologies Machine. It's a computerized machine that sends fingerprints electronically to the state.

Currently the department will do fingerprints using ink and rolling the fingers one by one to a sheet of paper.

"The machine will actually sense it and let us know if it's a good print or a bad print. If it's a bad print, we have the opportunity to take that individual print and we don't have to throw out the entire card and start the process all over again. It's a lot faster," Ryan Hilderbrandt of the Panama City Police Department said.

"We get walk-ins daily, people that are required to be fingerprinted for employment purposes, for state permitting purposes. So it will enabilize us to do that job," Chief Scott Ervin of the Panama City Police Department said.

The technology they have now is outdated and the system is down and no longer supported.

Source: WJHG