Idaho Falls Police Detectives are already trained to use high-tech, crime-solving technology, they just never had the equipment -- or the space -- to use that training... until now.

Ask almost anyone here at the Idaho Falls Police Department, and they'll tell you, they need a new building, they say. After all, this was their crime lab -- a room just 5 x 12 feet.

Steve Avery, Idaho Falls Police Detective: "It was a really tight area for any more than one person."

Ken Brown, Idaho Falls Police Department: "We were limited on space and equipment, and we were limited on the type of chemicals and processing we could do in there."

But the future of solving crimes in Idaho Falls is about to change.

There's now a new forensics lab, in a remodeled room at least four times the size of the old lab, with better, high tech equipment -- courtesy of frugal budget spending which left more than $30,000 for all this.

Detectives have been waiting for something like this for at least 5 years.

Cabinet space has allowed them to organize new materials that collect evidence. New lighting will make table examinations easier. In the old room upstairs, detectives had to build their own fuming device, where inside, a chemical fog detects fingerprints.

This is the new one, something you might see on television crime shows. It can hold even large evidence items. The machine next to it dries wet crime scene pieces so they can be tested properly. All the machines here contain and filter the chemicals inside, no longer exposing detectives to contaminants.

All this will make detective work more efficient, especially the new fingerprint database.

Brown: "Most crimes that are committed are crimes committed by people in our area."

Fingerprints found at a crime scene will now be entered into a local database system. It will match known fingerprints, or match prints found at other scenes to know if crimes are connected. If no matches are found, prints are sent to state crime labs, but results can take up to 6 months to come back. That means this, their own database system, could drastically reduce the time it takes to solve crimes.

And detectives say that after only a few days of use, there's already been one crime that's been helped solved by crime scene fingerprints which matched someone in the local database system.