Utah FY24 NCHIPSF

Under this award, the Utah Executive Office will transfer funds to the Department of Public Safety (DPS), Bureau of Criminal Identification (BCI) for the following projects: Project 1: Research and update missing dispositions, train local criminal justice personnel, and maintain and update the Utah Criminal History (UCH). The project is on-going and will be for the immediate future until a consensus on how to accurately match every court case to the arrest record can be resolved. The UT Department of Public Safety (DPS) will work with the Administrative Office of The Courts (AOC) to increase the success rate of disposition matching. This research will help Utah to identify problems and continue to train local justice personnel on criminal justice record improvement. Funds will also be utilized to implement process improvements that result from research conducted. Project 2: Train local criminal justice personnel on quality, complete, and accurate data for submission to the UCH. DPS delivers professional continuing education training to peace officers and dispatchers in a learning environment which is conducive with the expectations of Utah citizens for its law enforcement officers. Utah’s UCH is accessed daily by law enforcement agencies throughout the country. Data accuracy is key to ensuring public safety. Project 3: Research and update missing arrest and disposition records on UCH, update legacy (binary) AFIS records within the WIN system to NIST and eliminate the pseudo-pointer records in the FBI NGI file for Utah. Utah became an A-NFF state on April 13, 2022. There is still a need to update Utah arrest, disposition, and fingerprint records within the systems maintained by Utah. In addition, pseudo-pointer records in the FBI NGI system must be updated to be under the control of the state rather than the FBI. As this is a manual process and will be for a limited time, the funding will allow BCI to accomplish the goals within a shorter period rather than an on-going continual process. If the pseudo pointer work is finished early, these employees can assist with projects 1 and 4. Project 4: Hire two new employees to assist with the manual process related to court orders for Clean Slate expungements. The Utah Expungement Act was modified by the legislature in 2019 to include Clean Slate eligible cases. Expunging Clean Slate cases became operational in 2022. As of April 2023, BCI has received over 290,000 orders from the AOC. Two additional employees will help increase the rate at which Clean Slate eligible cases can be expunged. Project 5: Work with SEARCH and state IT to develop a UCH data quality dashboard and performance management. Having this dashboard will allow the repository to better know and understand the problems and where they are coming from so that a more targeted approach may be taken to fix these problems. Project 6: Rewrite the expungement program to interface with the UCH and other systems so that records can be efficiently and accurately updated in a timely manner. Project 7: Use funding to send staff to the SEARCH and Compact Council meetings.