Austria equips police nationwide with mobile fingerprint scanning

All Austrian police officers can now take fingerprints in the field using BioCapture on their service smartphones, ORF reported. The rollout follows a year-long trial and covers more than 32,000 officers, Interior Minister Gerhard Karner said.

The technology scans fingerprints on a phone and returns information through an app on whether they are already held in a database and can be linked to a person. Karner said officers no longer need to travel to police stations to confirm someone’s identity, saving time.

The system was demonstrated during an immigration-policing operation at Vienna’s Westbahnhof. Vienna police vice-president Dieter Csefan said mobile scans make checks easier because people may present false papers or have no documents with them. He said officers can remain on the street instead of leaving to establish an identity.

The year-long trial involved 600 officers in Vienna, Lower Austria and Styria. The Vienna police rapid-response unit joined in March 2026. Police carried out 2,516 scans across Austria during the test period.

In Vienna, the AFA foreign-police unit made 69 arrests, filed 136 administrative complaints and carried out 953 identity checks this year, Csefan said. The unit had access to fingerprint scans during the trial.

Under certain conditions, offenders are fingerprinted and their personal data, including DNA, can be stored in a central register. Foreign nationals and asylum seekers may also be fingerprinted under certain conditions, with their prints stored in a separate central database.

Austria plans to connect BioCapture to European biometric systems from 2027, which would give access to data on up to 400 million people. The app was developed by the Federal Criminal Police Office, the Austrian Institute of Technology and other research partners.