Wisconsin FY 2019 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 2019 NCHIP priority area 1, for updating and automating case outcomes in state records and the FBI’s Criminal History File, the Wisconsin Department of Justice (WIDOJ) will conduct two projects to contribute information to the NICS. Specifically, for 1) criminal history system redesign; and 2) manually index SIDs.

1) Criminal History System Redesign: WIDOJ will use NCHIP funds to develop a newly designed platform to support the Wisconsin Criminal History Repository, based on new technology that has long term viability. The project was developed through the Criminal History Systems Data Quality Study that was completed for the WIDOJ through the NCHIP FY14 award. As part of the Data Quality Study, the redesign of the criminal history system was recommended from the assessment of SEARCH, the National Consortium for Justice Information Statistics, as well as WIDOJ’s internal evaluation as part of the Fix NICS initiative. The new system design will deviate from the current systems tight coupling architecture that results in more frequent and longer outages. The new design will move to a loose coupling architecture with high availability, resiliency, and better data quality. Wisconsin’s current criminal history system is not able to be maintained without an outage during strict outage windows. The new design will have the availability built where maintenance can be accomplished without all the connected systems being taken offline.

2) Manually Index SIDs: WIDOJ will use NCHIP funds to support overtime for WIDOJ staff to manually review records to determine if the records can be indexed or if the information can be obtained and added to the Wisconsin record system. As part of the Fix NICS initiative, WIDOJ identified approximately 220,000 SIDs in WI criminal history repository that have an FBI number, but are not III-indexed records. The records need to be reviewed manually and indexed when possible to not lose access to arrest events that pre-date the Wisconsin Criminal History Repository. Each record that cannot be indexed needs to be reviewed to determine if the information can be obtained and added to the Wisconsin record system. It is important for these records to be reviewed because an indexed record would return a more complete Wisconsin record to the III, and where applicable, to the NICS.

(CA/NCF)