FY 2018 South Carolina NCHIP

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 NCHIP FY 2018 project, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) will conduct multiple projects that build off of previous years efforts. SLED will continue to support their efforts to manage and reduce the backlog of expungement, missing disposition and scanning records by expanding the team tasked with these assignments. Additionally, SLED will use a multi-personnel approach at addressing the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) audit training and helping statewide contacts improve the reporting of the required information. Funds will also be used to support the SLED Network upgrades. SLED is currently operating its NCIC, NICS, Computerized Criminal History (CCH), Sex Offender Registry (SOR) and International Justice Public Safety Network (Nlets) systems on aging network infrastructure. These network appliances that provide critical services to these network segments are approximately six years old and beginning to reach end of support and end of life status. The age of these appliances are becoming a concern because SLED is tasked with ensuring the reporting of NCIC, NICS, CCH, and various other law enforcement information in an accurate, expedient manner. These network systems are also beginning to lack the ability to reliably transmit data at speeds required by today’s law enforcement technologies. With the ever changing security landscape and the need to support new security technologies such as mobile architecture, these systems are increasingly inadequate. The need for greater performance and new security capabilities that are required to transport and protect sensitive data between SLED and various databases is critical to law enforcement safety. SLED will also use funds to continue assisting local agencies in acquiring livescan machines to record and transmit fingerprints to SLED. All state law enforcement agencies, by state regulation, must collect fingerprints for criminal charges and be sent to SLED within three days. These efforts will significantly improve South Carolina’s ability to provide accurate, complete, and timely information to NICS and other agencies nationwide for use in employment, licensing, and other authorized purposes.

(CA/NCF)