Delaware 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 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 will transfer funds to the Delaware State Police, State Bureau of Identification to enhance its Law Enforcement Investigation Report Suite (LEISS), a client-server-based police system comprised of two primary components: complaints/incidents and warrants/arrests. LEISS requires a better way to capture data relating to misdemeanor crimes of domestic violence, protection orders, crimes against the elderly, mental health-related incidents, as well as the use of weapons incidents. The enhancements needed for LEISS will bolster existing applications within the LEISS suite and thus are needed to ensure the most accurate data results. The lack of fingerprints for an arrest limit the ability for submitting agencies to transmit the arrest to the Interstate Identification Index (III); but also limit the submission of the dispositions to the FBI. Furthermore, the LEISS system will have added edits to ensure if a criminal summons (used to capture arrests on lesser charges such as violations and unclassified misdemeanors) are issued for specifically permitted offenses. Without enhanced edits officers would not be able to issue a summons for an offense and it would eliminate the submission of fingerprints.

Other enhancements will be made to LEISS involving changes in reporting crime records that are transmitted to both NICS and III. DELJIS (Delaware Criminal Justice Information System) staff will primarily focus on disposition records that are incomplete or inaccurate. The mission includes matching fingerprints with charges and ensuring that missing or inaccurate dispositions are located and corrected in the state’s repository. A project leader will work with the conversions so that court orders with expiration dates are edited as needed and names are added and removed when necessary; data for drug and alcohol incidents are recorded properly; and, new criminal charges and module enhancements do not create duplicate charges and errors and/or reporting errors.

(CA/NCF)