Delaware 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 non-criminal 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 this award, the Delaware Department of Safety and Homeland Security, formerly named the Delaware Department of Public Safety, will use funds to submit dispositions via Machine Readable Data (MRD). This project will manage the transfer of court and custody dispositions, and expungement data from the Delaware criminal history database to the FBI criminal history database. Since Delaware is a sole source state all data transfer must flow through the Delaware State Bureau of Identification (SBI). Disposition data has not been submitted by SBI to the FBI for the past 7 years due to attrition, loss of staff experienced in manually processing the data, and the volume of workload. To compound this problem, the applications that originally allowed SBI to electronically submit dispositions has been rendered useless due to changes in technology. The state will develop a new interface between SBI and the FBI to greatly increase the accuracy of disposition data available in the Interstate Identification Index and the NICS Index. CA/NCF