Florida's National Criminal History Improvement Program (NCHIP) FY2014

The goal of the National Criminal History Improvement Program (NCHIP) is to improve the Nation's safety and security by enhancing the quality, completeness, and accessibility of criminal history record information and by insuring the nationwide implementation of criminal justice and noncriminal justice background check systems. BJS provides direct financial and technical assistance to the states to improve criminal history and other related records and to build their infrastructure to connect to national record check systems both to supply information and to conduct the requisite checks.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE), the state's NCHIP administering agency, will use funds to complete three projects: 1) Computerized Criminal History (CCH) Programming. FDLE serves as the state's central repository for criminal history records. The Florida CCH, or criminal history repository, is more than 40 years old and still serves as the primary shared stakeholder system for criminal justice and law enforcement in the state. This system is also used by the Firearm Eligibility System (FES) to complete firearm related background checks, as well as report Florida's criminal history record information to the national system. FDLE is in the process of addressing the replacement of the CCH system but the process will overlap multiple fiscal years and require the continued approval and implementation of state legislative funding. In the meantime, the existing CCH must continue to be supported with minor modifications, enhancements, and/or updates to add or change functionality with disposition, firearm, biometric identification systems, and other related applications that interface or use CCH. Funds will be used to program the CCH to ensure these ancillary applications are able to communicate with and retrieve information from the CCH and maintain business workflows. In addition, CCH programming helps ensure the availability of NICS disqualifying records via III and increasing the percent of potentially disqualifying records with final court dispositions; 2) Comprehensive Case Information System (CCIS) Upgrade. CCIS was implemented statewide in 2006 and contains data from all 67 trial courts and has more than 38,000 users. However, the CCIS data exchange model does not provide for real-time access of court data on a statewide basis. This project will update the CCIS data exchange model to real-time access with all 67 Clerks' offices and expand the data elements needed by CCIS users. Funds will be used to make available noncriminal history record information relevant to firearms eligibility determination, support the exchange of information among criminal justice agencies including law enforcement, courts, prosecutors and corrections, improve the ability to track stalking, domestic violence offenses, and protection orders, both circuit and statewide, and make this information available for real-time access; and 3) Livescan replacement. Florida currently has 41 county jails and 10 Juvenile Assessment Centers (JAC) that are using livescan devices with the Microsoft Windows XP operating system. As of April 2014, Microsoft is no longer providing security patches for the XP operating system. If the operating system of these livescan devices were compromised, it could impact the entire Florida Criminal Justice Network (CJNet). This would result in agencies manually fingerprinting subjects and submitting paper records to FDLE by mail, which would delay the arrest entry in the Florida criminal history system and subsequent arrest entries IAFIS and III. Funds will be used to replace 10 of these outdated Livescans. (CA/NCF)