FY 2022 Alaska NICS Act Record Improvement Program

The Department of Public Safety (DPS) is requesting funding for three Criminal Justice Technicians (CJT) and one Criminal Justice Specialist to research Misdemeanor Crimes of Domestic Violence (MCDV) convictions for submission into the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) Indices and the Interstate Identification Index (III). The FBI did not find Alaska statutory language for MCDV crimes to qualify as federal prohibitor until the Voisine v United States decision. Alaska statutes define a “domestic” relationship more broadly than the federal standard, and assault and harassment statutes do not have separate subsections that describe domestic violence.  Each conviction must be assessed to determine if it constitutes a firearm disqualification; there are roughly 84,000 convictions to be reviewed. DPS requests funds for three CJTs and workstations to enter mental health commitments, misdemeanor firearms conditions of probation, process NICS requests, and maintain domestic violence protective orders. DPS also requests funds for two CJTs and workstations to address a backlog of approximately 82,000 dismissal reports and one CJT to locate and enter missing felony/misdemeanor dispositions. There are over 189,521 records with missing dispositions in the repository. The Alaska Court System (ACS) requests funds to convert from a manual to an electronic system to reduce the number of missing dispositions and inaccuracies in data relevant for firearm eligibility determinations. The ACS’ new electronic filing system requires criminal e-filing at 18 courts statewide.  An integral part of the system is a courtroom solution for automating dispositions and distribution. The Program Analyst (PA) will work on electronic forms, courtroom criminal data collection, interfaces, design, development, forms programming and improvements, testing to ensure collection of accurate data, monitoring and validating data in the forms. Records Clerks will prepare criminal cases for scanning. In electronic format, more case dispositions will be more accessible.  The ACS requests funds for a PA to work on the courtroom solution and related electronic projects; training courses for the PA; and two Records Clerks to digitize a six-year backlog of paper criminal cases pre-dating the ACS electronic project.