FY 2019 New York State National Criminal History Improvement Program

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 2019 NCHIP priority areas, the NYS, Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS), will administer and manage four projects.

1) Adult Court Transmission and Processing System: NCHIP funds will be used to continue the work to create the system specifications for a new case-based adult court transmission and processing system. Due to the complexity of handling dispositions for adult court, this project is part of larger program that will extend for approximately three to five years to fully implement a new inter-agency system. The team will need to complete the detailed system specifications for a wholly new transmission architecture, and the replacement of the outdated processing logic that was originally structured for mainframe transaction-based technologies. The specification effort will include several large system components for both agencies that impact adult court outcome reporting, updates to NYS RAP sheets, and updates to Federal repositories.

2) Courts Transition to Universal Case Management System (UCMS) to Report to DCJS: Office of Court Administration (OCA) will further improve the timeliness, accuracy and completeness of disposition information that is reported from the Justice Courts in New York State. OCA will analyze and complete the technical design for a mechanism to report the disposition data directly into the UCMS used by the state-paid criminal courts, which would move toward eliminating the legacy mainframe platform and the delayed reporting that currently exists. The complete multi-year plan will require dispositional information to be validated for completeness and accuracy and then subsequently distributed in a real-time manner to update the criminal history information.

3) Identifiers Clean Up: OCA will analyze and resolve the issue with incorrect individual identifiers on court cases found during the FY 2017 NCHIP grant work. OCA will identify the court cases impacted and provide court users with the ability to create or modify a link between an arrest and court case information as cases are updated in the UCMS. The project will address and further support the remediation of un-docketed and missing arrests records that currently exist in DCJS’s Computerized Criminal History records. Additionally, by implementing this solution, OCA will be addressing the issue of identifying juvenile arrest records that should be linked to Family Court cases. By providing DCJS with accurate identifiers, these previously open arrests will be reported accurately.

4) Livescan Purchase: DCJS will purchase new livescan equipment for approximately 255 law enforcement agencies. Many of the law enforcement agency locations have aging livescans that need to be replaced. In addition, the software that runs on the equipment is obsolete and needs to be upgraded. As part of the livescan project, DCJS will accept requests submitted by each law enforcement agency throughout the state that has determined it needs new livescan equipment and review the submission for approval.

(CA/NCF)