State Legislatures Magazine: January 2002

Editor's Note: This article appeared in the January 2002 issue of NCSL's magazine, State Legislatures. To order copies or to subscribe, contact the marketing department at (303) 364-7700.

Fighting Crime With Information

Kansas, too
Sharing Power and Cooperation
Federal Money Available

Finding It on the Web

Fighting Crime with Information

Improved safety comes with integrating criminal justice information systems, but the process isn't easy. And it takes money.

By Blake Harrison
Minnesota Representative Richard Stanek, a veteran of the Minneapolis police force, was the watch commander on the night of Sept. 29, 1997, when a women was fatally shot by her ex-husband. At first this tragedy seemed to be another inevitable, brutal crime.

But in the days that followed, it became obvious that the murder might have been prevented if judges and prosecutors knew the killer's complete criminal record. The murder occurred while the man was out on bail, awaiting sentencing, just three weeks after he was convicted of killing his ex-wife's new boyfriend. In addition, and unbeknownst to the judge who approved his release, the man previously had been arrested for threatening his ex-wife with a gun and had been convicted of robbery in 1995.

If the criminal justice system failed in this case, it was not the result of careless police work or lack of scrutiny on the part of the judge. It stemmed from the lack of information exchange among criminal justice agencies and officials. These early crimes occurred in different counties within Minnesota, preventing the sentencing judge from having all relevant information. At that time, the state's criminal information system was incapable of tracking an offender's status and record throughout Minnesota's 87 counties.

"Every time I talk to an official about integrated criminal justice, they have a similar story highlighting the need to bring criminal databases up to speed," Stanek said. "The technology is available. We just have to have the political will to put the right kind of system in place."

Stanek, along with other lawmakers, agency officials and business leaders, has since worked to make Minnesota's system the best funded in the country and an example for other states.

The vision for an integrated criminal justice information system is grand, and yet basic. It is a system in which criminal justice personnel have, within minutes, each piece of information needed to make informed decisions. Planning for integration also addresses who can obtain what data, with built-in security and privacy safeguards.

The public, and even some elected officials, may assume that in the information age such a system already exists. But pertinent data like outstanding warrants, protective orders, child support orders, sexual offender registration requirements, and the status of probation and drug treatment is often maintained in separate databases by different agencies, often at different levels of government.

"There is a very wide gap between public expectation and the reality of these systems," says Joe Lehman, head of the Washington Department of Corrections. He says that paroled offenders often have prohibitions requiring them to stay away from minors, felons or victims, but an officer on the street has no way of knowing about these conditions. When information breakdowns cause failure to prevent or detect crimes committed, corrections gets a black eye. "We need connectivity because the state is being held accountable," Lehman says. "There is no limit on liability when errors occur as a result of information that the department should have known."

In at least 31 states, integration efforts are under way to pull this information together. Yet to date, none are fully operational.

In Minnesota, the system called CrimNet will be able to link existing and developing criminal justice information systems that contain thorough case information. The system is capable of collecting and sharing everything from an incident report through disposition.

Two years ago if a city police officer in Minnesota wanted to know if a suspect was on probation in another county, he would have to call every jurisdiction or rely on the offender's word. Today most counties are connected and are able to find the information through the Internet. Soon every county will be included. When the system is complete, any officer in the state will be able to get an instantaneous record on a suspect from inside the patrol car.

Lack of readily available complete information helps criminals and impedes law enforcement, Stanek says. It's a public safety issue as well as an officer safety issue. If an officer knows a suspect has a violent history before he responds to a call, he can proceed accordingly.

The greatest benefits to integration-an improved justice system and enhanced public safety-are hard to quantify. Other easier-to-see benefits are things like more accurate information and better efficiency in getting and sharing data. Once information is placed in an integrated system, it doesn't need to be entered again. This saves on labor costs and prevents duplicate entries that often result in errors. Records can then be shared electronically with fewer transmission costs and without the time lags of pushing paper.

Minnesota's spadework began in the early 1990s when Senator Jane Ranum introduced legislation to identify information gaps in the criminal justice system. A task force created by the legislation reported some findings, shocking even to Ranum, an experienced prosecutor from Hennepin County who knows the system from the inside out. "Almost half of all felonies were not even reported because there was such a backlog. The ones that were in the system were more than a year old."

Following that discovery, the Legislature began funding updates to the state's criminal history records, including solving access, retention and accuracy problems. By 1999, both policy and funding were driv-ing integration of Minnesota's criminal justice information. A policy group created by the Legislature consisting of agency heads and members of the business community guided the process.

A significant obstacle, according to legislators involved, was opposition from agencies that didn't want to give up their current systems or relinquish power over their information. The Legislature required that funding requests by state, county or local agencies be reviewed by the policy group to ensure the proposal was compatible with integration. Tying funding to integration has helped keep the efforts on track, and, according to Ranum, ensured that legislation designed to enhance public safety can do in practice what the Legislature set out as its purpose.

"We have spent a lot of time in the last eight years focused on legislation to protect people." Ranum said. "You can't, for example, be hired in a day care facility or work in a nursing home if you have a certain kind of criminal record. But we need timely and accurate information to make that type of legislation meaningful and effective."

KANSAS, TOO
Kansas also has had an integrated system for the past seven years. Kansas' Criminal Justice Information System was created in 1994 to meet requirements of the National Instant Check System, also known as the Brady Bill, which aimed to improve criminal history records for background searches for gun purchases. The Kansas system works off a central repository system that serves as a directory to law enforcement so that government employees can get information they need without having to know who keeps it. This has allowed Kansas to move their integrated justice systems projects along faster than most states. The system today has state criminal history information available to court, community correction and parole officers.

Kansas became the first state in 1999 approved by the FBI to access the National Criminal Information Center via the Internet. The national center is a database that provides documented criminal justice information to law enforcement agencies. This approval allows qualified personnel quick access to national records without having to dial into the center through dedicated terminals. Everyone connected to the Kansas system can now find out if a suspect has warrants or action pending in other states.

In Colorado, the state's Integrated Criminal Justice Information System links five state-level criminal justice agencies-law enforcement, district attorneys, courts, and adult and youth corrections. A user on any of the five systems can view information contained on another system as if it were stored locally.

SHARING POWER AND COOPERATION
Each of these states arrived at an integrated system in different ways, but all have had in common different agencies working together to develop a plan for integration that was followed with adequate funding.

"Agencies need to share power, and cooperation needs to take place at the highest level in order to make sure the vision is achieved," said former Colorado Representative Peggy Kerns, who sponsored legislation to enable integration. "It means they are giving up autonomous control of certain information and the system they built to house it."

Lawmakers and justice officials in other states face similar challenges in updating criminal records and information systems. In today's highly mobile society, preventing crime in one state may very well depend on how well another state manages its records. The Interstate Compact on Community Supervision, now passed by 24 states, has among its objectives improved and expedited information sharing when offenders move to another state. Complete adoption of the National Crime Prevention and Privacy Compact will allow full use of the Interstate Identification Index, a decentralized system for the exchange of criminal history records for employment and other background checks.

There has been some resistance by privacy advocates to integration efforts. Preventing sensitive information from getting into the wrong hands is a legitimate concern and needs to be addressed. Richard Varn, the Iowa chief information officer and a former state senator, says much of the resistance is aimed at keeping public information relatively inaccessible, but is misplaced. "If information is public, it should be accessible. If advocates want information to remain private, they should work to keep it private in all forms."

FEDERAL MONEY AVAILABLE
Convincing state agencies and local governments to scrap their current infrastructure is difficult if they don't have the funds needed to help them update and integrate. Federal money has contributed substantially to state efforts-covering about two-thirds of the costs to date in Kansas and Colorado. Congress passed the Crime Identification Technology Act in 1999, which authorized assistance to states to establish or upgrade criminal justice information systems. Congress is expected to appropriate $150 million to the effort for FY 2002.

Federal funds may also be used to support state and local participation in national databases managed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, such as the National Instant Check System, Combined DNA Information System and the Interstate Identification Index system. "These systems will meet their full potential only to the degree that state systems are upgraded and interconnected," says Dave Roberts, the executive director of Search, a consortium working with the Office of Justice Programs to improve justice integration.

The Office of Justice Programs has overseen the federal initiative in recent years to encourage and support integration of state and local criminal justice information. Grant programs ranging from Byrne Formula Grants to the National Criminal History Improvement Program to the technology program under Community Oriented Policing Services have contributed more than $800 million per year to state efforts. The high-alert status of local law enforcement agencies since the recent terrorist attacks on the United States brings with it new challenges for information management. "This is a critical time for making real progress in criminal justice information sharing-not only to fight terrorism in the wake of Sept. 11, but to improve the effectiveness of the justice system," says Richard R. Nedelkoff, director of the Bureau of Justice Assistance. "To be successful, we must promote collaboration and information sharing among all agencies."

Minnesota's CrimNet has enjoyed much greater state funding over more years than other state efforts. To date, the Legislature has appropriated $57 million to get the state's databases interconnected. The entire project could cost up to $250 million, with some of that coming through federal grant programs, but Dale Good, the Supreme Court's director of integrated technology, is quick to put that figure in perspective.

"The costs for integration compare to an annual budget of $2 billion that the state spends on criminal justice operations," says Dale. "And that's for a system that doesn't work well without integration."

Blake Harrison works on criminal justice information in NCSL's Denver office.

Finding it on the Web

The Office of Justice Programs Information Technology Initiative.

http://www.it.ojp.gov

The Crime Identification Technology Act (CITA).

http://it.ojp.gov/fund/sources.html

SEARCH, the national consortium for justice information and statistics.

http://www.search.org/

Government Technology, technology solutions for state and local governments.

http://www.govtech.net/

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