State justice agencies are looking beyond the program's short-term goal of identifying persons who are ineligible to purchase handguns or work in child care, and see NCHIP's funding as a way to kick-start a nationwide criminal identification network. "Identification is not a local or state issue, it's a national issue," said Jack Scheidegger, chief of criminal identification and information for the California Department of Justice. "If you want to let somebody buy a gun, you need to know where the criminal history is nationally because of the high rate of reciprocity among criminals."
Scheidegger said that his department hopes to use the funds for Brady to leverage other federal and state funding to build a paperless criminal history and identification network. "The Brady fund is seed money," he said, "and it's providing us with a catalyst to seek additional funds ... to build our paperless system."
MEETING TIMETABLES
The overall goals of the NCHIP grant program are to assist states with quickly and accurately identifying persons who are ineligible to purchase a firearm, as well as to ensure that any person responsible for caring for children, the elderly or the disabled, does not have any disqualifying criminal record. The grant is also aimed at enhancing the quality, completeness and accessibility of the nation's criminal history record systems.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), which is administering the grant program, NCHIP will help states meet timetables set by Attorney General Janet Reno for criminal history record completeness. Those timetables vary, but for some states, including California and New York, they call for state criminal records to reach a completion rate of 80 percent by 1998 and as close to 100 percent as possible by the year 2000.
Incomplete records are seen by many as major stumbling blocks to implementing the Brady Act. Without completeness and accuracy in records, background checks will not stop those who are ineligible from purchasing a firearm or working in child care when they have a criminal record.
NCHIP will also help states participate in the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Interstate Identification Index (III), which is Phase I in the FBI's four-phase, $787 million Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification Project. III is a database of 30 million criminal history records that will support 17,000 police departments nationwide upon its completion in 1998. NCHIP funding will also support state participation in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.
States will use NCHIP funds to improve the level of criminal history record automation, accuracy and completeness, as well as develop procedures for accessing records of persons other than felons who are ineligible to purchase firearms. They will also use the grant money to develop systems that interface with the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) to identify records of crimes involving the use of firearms or abuse of children.
In announcing the NCHIP grant program, BJS Director Jan M. Chailken said that the importance of improving criminal history records cannot be overstated. Not only do the records play a growing role in identifying serious offenders under various state and federal statutes, they also are used increasingly for non-criminal purposes, such as background checks for licensing, pre-employment screening and security clearances.
FUNDING
The Brady Act authorized $200 million toward criminal history improvement and identification systems. The Child Protection Act called for spending another $20 million toward automation. However, the Crime Bill appropriated only $100 million to implement these two acts.
Of this amount, $6 million goes to the FBI for the instant background check system, $1 million will cover federal agency administration and $5 million will be directed toward five states with the least amount of automation. Those states are Maine, Mississippi, New Mexico, Vermont and West Virginia. The remaining $88 million will be made available directly to the other 45 states. The funds will be awarded to a single state agency designated by the governor.
States can also seek additional federal funding under guidelines governing use of the Byrne Formula funds. The Byrne Formula allows states to use up to 5 percent of federal block grant funds to be earmarked for criminal history improvement and automation.
For states like California and New York, funds from the NCHIP program will pay for only a fraction of what they need to upgrade criminal histories and to develop the kind of system needed to assist with identification for firearm purchases and child care employment. But the impact of the funding goes far beyond what it delivers in actual dollars.
According to Owen Greenspan, deputy commissioner for identification services for New York's Division of Criminal Justice Services, the funding will have a ripple effect throughout law enforcement. "The funds aren't just a band-aid, but the start of something much bigger that's going to have a permanent, beneficial impact on public safety across the nation," he said.
Like Greenspan, Scheidegger sees the NCHIP funding as opening a door to a broad-based public safety program in California. The Department of Justice is looking to build a paperless environment in which law enforcement agencies anywhere in the state can transmit electronic images of fingerprints for matching and verification that will take just hours instead of weeks or months. At the same time, the system will link law enforcement agencies with prosecutors and the courts so that dispositions can be transmitted electronically, rather than manually as is done now.
Until recently, little was being done to build a statewide network that could support these applications. But Scheidegger expects the Brady money to help trigger other funding to come his way. "I'm not going to implement this paperless environment in California just from Brady money, because there's not enough," he said. "But I can say that I hope to use the funds as an impetus to secure additional state and federal funds.
Search Group Inc., a nonprofit, state-supported research organization for criminal justice, is working with the Bureau of Justice Statistics to provide technical assistance for the NCHIP program. Search is helping states prepare information for funding applications, will review state criminal justice systems and make recommendations on where funding best ought to be used. For more information, contact Sheila Barton, deputy director of law and policy, 916/392-2550.
[March Table of Contents]
