Utah 2017 National 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 this award, the Utah Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice (CCJJ) will transfer funds to the Utah Department of Public Safety (DPS) to improve public safety in the state by enhancing the quality, completeness, and accessibility of criminal history record information. Funds are requested to continue to research and update missing court dispositions to ensure availability through the Computerized Criminal History (CCH) system and accessibility at the time of a national background check. The disposition research project builds on the success of the 1989 through 2015 research efforts that have increased the felony disposition reporting rate to over 85 percent. Additional resources are being allocated to this function to ensure that the felony reporting rate remains high. The ongoing research of missing current and historical dispositions is still needed to assure accountability from agencies and overall accuracy of the criminal history data. DPS still has the need to maintain a training program to deal with the issues leading to failed disposition reporting at both local law enforcement agencies and the courts. Disposition training and research also serves the purpose of making courts and local law enforcement agencies throughout Utah continuously aware of the importance of accurate and complete reporting of dispositions.

DPS will also use funds to enhance the batch application for uploading dispositions to the FBI. Plans are underway to develop an enhancement to the criminal history system that will allow researchers to query the failed submission records, review the cause for submission failure and then allow the researcher to update criminal history information to correct the record. Once corrected, the batch application will be able to detect that the record has been modified and will attempt submission again.

In addition, DPS plans to develop programming to enhance the completeness and accuracy of the Utah Criminal History (UCH) and other systems post-Oracle migration. The Department of Technology Services developers assigned to DPS have been working for the last two years on migrating from the State’s Informix database to a new Oracle database. Currently, there is a large backlog of programming enhancements and fixes for the criminal history system as well as all the other systems at DPS. Funds will be used to pay for overtime for the DTS developers to work on program enhancements and fixes to the criminal history system.

This has been a major project that all of the programming resources have been dedicated to. This has resulted in a large backlog of programming enhancements and fixes for the Criminal History system as well as all the other systems at DPS. DPS as a department has met and prioritized projects/enhancements/fixes that developers will begin working on now that the Oracle conversion is winding down. There are some enhancements/fixes to Criminal History that have been prioritized, but there are many other enhancements/fixes that did not get prioritized at the Department level but are critical to Criminal History processing within BCI. (CA/NCF)