FY 2016 Guam Criminal History Improvement Project

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 Judiciary of Guam (Judiciary) will use funds to conduct three (3) activities – 1) Equipment Backup and Redundancy 2) Backlog of Court Disposition and Criminal History Records and 3) Updating Guam Police Department RMS database with State Identification Numbers (SID), FBI numbers and firearm registration data.

Under the Equipment Backup and Redundancy project, the Judiciary has migrated about 70% of its servers to virtual machines (VMs). This enables the dynamic allocation of resources (processor, memory, storage and network) as workloads require. The movement to VMs has also improved the ability to ensure the continuity of operations (COOP) for users. By using features such as site to site replication of VMs, if the primary production site goes down, the COOP site can be up and running within minutes to hours, depending upon configuration. The primary site employs features such as redundant systems, storage area networks, and multiple network switches to eliminate single points of failure, but COOP sites are usually less robust to reduce cost.

Under the Backlog of Court Disposition and Criminal History Records project, the Judiciary has a large volume of un-entered cases going back several decades. In order to protect these paper records from decay, and to ensure that all case data is digitized for easy access and are catalogued and entered into the JudiciaryÂ’s Case Management System (CMS), the Judiciary of Guam needs to increase the capacity of its NCIC Unit. This will ensure that there are sufficient personnel to perform this vital task of inputting backlogged case files entered into the CMS.

Under Updating Guam Police Department RMS database with State Identification Numbers (SID), FBI numbers and firearm registration data project, the Judiciary will enter SIDs, FBI numbers and firearms registration data into the Guam Police DepartmentÂ’s Law Enforcement Records Management System (LERMS). The Judiciary is working diligently to becoming Interstate Identification Index (III) compliant and, to accomplish this, Guam must first have a system in which they have and can assign SID and FBI numbers to their criminal history records. Currently, the Judiciary is having to manually input and verify the records but, in conjunction with efforts such as Activity 1, the Judiciary is trying to improve the systems and processes that will provide efficiency and accessibility.

The Judiciary will be responsible for contributing a 10% match under the 2016 NCHIP grant. (CA/NCF)