DC-NCHIP FY16

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.

Under the 2016 NCHIP, the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) of Washington, DC will use funds to automate the flow of warrant sand protection orders across partners and to the FBI. Since the 1980’s the DC Superior Court (DCSC) has assigned staff to manually enter and update warrants and protection orders in the Metropolitan Police Department’s (MPD) WALES warrant system. A select number of these hand keyed warrants and protection orders are then submitted to NCIC. Over the past six months, partners from across the District’s adult justice system have collaborated with the FBI and SEARCH through the DC Criminal Justice Coordinating Council’s (CJCC) Combatting Violent Crime Workgroup to examine the District’s submissions to the FBI maintained systems. As part of this effort, the CJCC and partner agencies looked closely at how and what agencies were submitting to NCIC with respect to warrants and protection orders. The examination revealed a reporting gap of more than 11,000 arrest and bench warrants that could be submitted to NCIC or the NICS Index.

In an effort to close this gap, increase the number of records submitted to the FBI and minimize opportunities for human error, the MPD, DCSC and CJCC will leverage and enhance existing information feeds from the Court’s CourtView database to automatically populate MPD’s WALES system. The WALES system will then be programmed to automatically submit protection orders and felony arrest warrants into NCIC and misdemeanor arrest and bench warrants into the NICS Index. The implementation of this program will require the modification of existing databases, warrant information feeds and the District’s justice information sharing system known as JUSTIS.

MPD will be responsible for contributing a 10% in-kind match to the project. (CA/NCF)