Delaware FY 2021 NARIP

Presently, in Delaware, persons acting strangely that were arrested and taken to the hospital for evaluation have been coded as mental patients by the arresting officer even before the doctor made his/her determination. This information was coded into the state database and transmitted to NICS as a person prohibited from purchasing a firearm. To address the problem, the Delaware Health and Social Services submitted to DELJIS (Delaware Criminal Justice Information System) the records that needed to be added to the G4 file. This file contains the records that have been validated by Health and Social Services as true commitments. In 2015, the Delaware Department of Safety and Homeland Security received funds to match criminal history records in the state's criminal history repository against the G4 file to check for accuracy and completeness. Funds from the FY 2016 NCHIP program were used to match the records by names in the G4 file against records in the court's database. In FY 2017, the agency sought funds to search the Superior Court's database to validate records of person's having been involuntary committed and to maintain a copy of the record in DELJIS. Funds from the FY 2018 NARIP program tasked research technicians with flagging both the base name and alias names of individuals whose record is being added to the G4 file. Once the records are checked, they are electronically sent to DELJIS, then to the NICS Index. In 2019, Delaware used funds to add new records to the NICS database of individuals that may have been missed in III or in the FBI database due to a lack of fingerprints.

From 2019 to the present, as comprehensive reviews progressed, it became obvious that Lethal Protection Orders in the Superior Court were overlapping with domestic violence matters from the Family Court. New expungement legislation expanding the scope of crimes eligible for expungement are posing new problems. Because of the issues, additional auditing and data clean-up are needed. Grant funds will be used to continue these efforts. Additionally, Delaware has begun the process of integrating the FBI's NFF database and has completed the required NFF on-Site program visit. To become NFF-compliant, Delaware will continue mapping business requirements and table matching during this grant period. This project will be integral in matching AFIS-CCH-NICS records between the various categories which are most challenging: mental health lethal protection (red flag) orders, domestic violence records, juvenile records and expunged/deleted charging records.