Nevada Criminal History Bureau Disposition Backfill Project

The NICS Improvement Amendments Act of 2007, Pub. L. 110-180 ("NICS Improvement Act"), was signed into law by the President on January 8, 2008. The NICS Improvement Act amends the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993 ("the Brady Act") (Pub. L. 103-159), under which the Attorney General established the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). The Brady Act requires Federal Firearms Licensees (FFLs) to contact the NICS before transferring a firearm to an unlicensed person for information on whether the proposed transferee is prohibited from receiving or possessing a firearm under state or federal law. The NICS Improvement Act authorizes grants to be made in a manner consistent with the National Criminal History Improvement Program (NCHIP).

Under this award, the Nevada Department of Public Safety (DPS), the state's NARIP and NCHIP administering agency, will pass through funding to the DPS Records Bureau to support staff efforts to enter dispositions into the Nevada Computerized Criminal History System (CCH) and the FBI's Interstate Identification Index (III) so that final case outcomes will be available in both state and national systems. Like many states, Nevada is struggling to improve incomplete, untimely, and inaccurate criminal history records. A recent independent audit of the quality of Nevada's criminal history records revealed that the probability of a recorded, complete, accurate, and timely criminal history record in the Nevada Criminal History Repository, housed within the DPS Records Bureau, is 24.91%. A major contributing factor to Nevada's incomplete criminal history records is the lack of final dispositions indicating the outcome of criminal charges. The state has been making targeted efforts to address its record quality problem and the state's General Services Division (GSD) recently conducted an audit to identify the scope of the problem and develop a strategy to address the disposition-reporting issues. The audit found that, of the 78 courts in Nevada, only 26 courts were consistently reporting dispositions to the Nevada Criminal History Repository and that over 800,000 dispositions that have not been submitted to the Criminal History Repository in over 20 years. As a result of those court audits and additional outreach efforts conducted by GSD, as of March 14, 2014, the Repository has received 800,497 dispositions to backfill into their corresponding arrest records. FY 2013 NCHIP funds are currently supporting efforts to develop a mechanism to electronically match these missing dispositions with their corresponding arrests, but many of these old dispositions do not contain sufficient information to allow the electronic matching to be successful. Consequently, staff will have to manually handle each disposition to research the missing information before it can be entered into the state's CCH and the FBI's III. The state is currently using FY 2013 NARIP funding to support ten temporary FTE's to assist with backfilling the missing dispositions and is requesting FY 2014 NARIP funding to hire ten additional FTE positions to support this effort. The state estimates that it will take approximately two years to backfill these missing dispositions. Nevada is a Point of Contact (POC) state under Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993. This effort will greatly improve the availability, quality, and completeness of records queried during a background check by ensuring dispositions or prohibiting records are readily available for firearm determinations. GSD certifies that the state submits to NICS information on all persons prohibited from possessing firearms for mental health reasons. (CA/NCF)