Criminal justice systems must be flexible if they are to meet the needs of our ever-changing society. For example, a single head of household was an anomaly several generations ago; now it is common. Criminal justice professionals, agencies and institutions must first recognize the needs and problems that are associated with such societal changes and then must be flexible so that they can serve the public in the best way possible.
A large part of this flexibility is acknowledging that services are most effective when they are the result of collaborative efforts. Agencies, both public and private, must work together to share information, coordinate services and target their resources. In the near term, integrating justice information statewide will accomplish the most to help criminal justice professionals do their work. That is why the recommendations listed in this section of the Agenda emphasize actions that can be taken now to see that criminal justice information is available where, when and how it is needed especially at the local level.
With this in mind, the Governor's Crime Commission seeks recommendations that emphasize prevention and early intervention; they seek proposals for approaches that are proactive rather than reactive. Furthermore, the Commission continuously seeks proposals that have the best likelihood of continuously strengthening an integrated crime fighting system.
This legislative request seeks the necessary appropriations to complete funding for the CJIN Governance Board and the Data Sharing Standards Project.
During the 1994 Special Crime Session of the General Assembly, the Criminal Justice Information Network Study Committee was created with a primary directive to identify alternative strategies for developing and implementing a statewide criminal justice information network (CJIN) that would permit the sharing of information between state and local agencies. An examination of the state's criminal justice information systems revealed the following deficiencies:
The Study Committee outlined several recommendations for improving the criminal justice information systems beginning with (1) establishing a CJIN Governing Board that would be responsible for creating, promoting, and enforcing policies and standards, and (2) establishing common data standards for sharing information that would ensure that all criminal justice agencies are speaking the same language by using common crime definitions and the same numerical codes and computer screens for consistent data entry.
To initiate these recommendations, the General Assembly was asked for $400,000 to create the CJIN Governing Board and $2.1 million to conduct the Data Sharing Standards Project. During the second extra session of 1996, the General Assembly appropriated $100,000 to support the operation of the Governing Board, including staff salaries, benefits, and related expenses. Additionally, $300,000 was appropriated toward the Data Sharing Standards Project.
Because these two projects are cornerstones for CJIN, their success is crucial to a complete, integrated, and mobile criminal justice information network in North Carolina. The critical first step in defining and implementing the CJIN is the creation of the Governing Board. Strategic leadership from both the state and local levels is required to meet objectives. The CJIN Governing Board is designed as a broad management structure for assuring compatibility and accessibility of all information relevant to the criminal justice system. It is not a controlling agency; in fact, nothing in the CJIN objective is intended to infringe on local authority or the operational integrity of any agency.
The Data Sharing Standards Project is the foundation that will allow the Governing Board to create a complete data dictionary for North Carolina, including common definitions, code structures, and formats. The creation of this data dictionary will provide greater efficiency within agencies and will standardize system architecture to allow the sharing of data between state and local systems. Once this project is completed, all other elements of CJIN can be successfully implemented.
The Governor's Crime Commission recommends that the General Assembly enact legislation to require the fingerprinting of all persons who are arrested for and/or convicted of misdemeanor offenses.
Under current North Carolina law (N.C.G.S. 15A-502), all persons who are arrested for the commission of a felony must be fingerprinted at the local booking facility. These prints are then forwarded to the State Bureau of Investigation's Division of Criminal Information where they serve as the core component for developing and maintaining the state's computerized criminal history (CCH) files. The law does not mandate the fingerprinting of misdemeanants but rather allows the local jurisdiction to set its own policy in this area. Consequently, the state CCH files contain some, but not all, misdemeanor arrest records. This practice can leave significant gaps in individual criminal histories when criminal justice officials are trying to determine the accuracy and completeness of an offender's criminal record.
This recommendation is consistent with the recommendations of the CJIN Study Committee and will significantly improve the accuracy, completeness, and quality of North Carolina's criminal history records. The inclusion of misdemeanor arrests/convictions in the criminal history database will allow criminal justice professionals to obtain a more accurate and comprehensive profile of an offender's criminal behavior. Armed with a more thorough criminal history record, criminal justice officials will be able to make better informed and more reliable decisions as the offender progresses through the system.
As noted in the CJIN study, requiring the mandatory fingerprinting of all misdemeanants would increase each county's fingerprint workload approximately 500 percent; however, the implementation of Livescan and AFIS technology would reduce this burden. As a point of reference, the total number of misdemeanor arrests for Part II offenses in 1995 was an estimated 406,176 persons. The Administrative Office of the Courts reported that 40,264 misdemeanor cases were filed in superior court during fiscal year 1994/1995. During the same period, 632,836 misdemeanor criminal non-motor vehicle cases and 584,729 criminal motor vehicle misdemeanor cases were filed in the district courts. An additional 734,665 misdemeanor infraction cases were also filed. Thus, the data storage capacity of the state CCH would be taxed immensely.
The Crime Commission has awarded Drug Control and System Improvement money to 20 counties for the purchase of Livescan devices. The Commission is seeking funding to place Livescan devices in 20 more of North Carolina's 100 counties.
A Livescan system is an electronic device that uses imaging scanning technology to capture digitized fingerprint impressions. A suspect's fingers are placed on an attached scanner and a legible, complete, and accurate digitized "snapshot" of the fingerprints is obtained. Once in this digital format, the fingerprints can be electronically submitted to the SBI and forwarded to the FBI in a matter of minutes.
North Carolina law mandates the fingerprinting of all individuals who are arrested on a felony charge. The most prevalent form of fingerprinting suspects is antiquated, time consuming, redundant, and subject to numerous technical difficulties. Two sets of fingerprints are usually obtained for each felon. One copy is forwarded to the State Bureau of Investigation; the other set is forwarded to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Many jurisdictions require that a third set be kept on file locally. Detention center staff must manually ink each suspect's fingers and roll a full, complete, and legible set of ten fingerprints. This process requires considerable skill on the part of detention center staff and consequently raises the possibility that many inaccurate or partial sets will be obtained. The SBI estimates that as many as 10 percent of the fingerprint sets submitted to them are rejected because of inaccurate, incomplete, or illegible impressions.
Once two complete inked impressions are obtained, local officials must then mail these prints to the SBI's Raleigh office. Here, data entry clerks manually search to determine if the suspect's fingerprints are already on file. SBI staff perform over 300 searches per day and often do duplicate, and sometimes triplicate, data entry for the same set of fingerprint submissions. It can take up to two weeks from the point of local fingerprinting to the data entry stage at the SBI.
The CJIN Study Committee recommended reducing the time that it takes to positively identify a suspect from two weeks to as little as twenty minutes with the use of Livescan fingerprinting . This objective cannot be attained with current fingerprinting and data submission practices. The Committee further recommended that each county should possess at least one Livescan device.
In addition to a reduction in suspect identification time, the eventual implementation and use of Livescan equipment will benefit the criminal justice system by:
This expansion request seeks funds to obtain and install the necessary equipment to provide 30 additional remote tower sites. Once this second phase of the CJIN-MDN project is completed, mobile data network presence will be available for every North Carolina county that contains a segment of interstate highway. Consequently, all law enforcement agencies within these interstate highway areas will be able to access this network.
The CJIN Study identified two sites that are currently in the process of establishing and implementing statewide mobile voice and data networks. Michigan awarded a $187 million contract to Motorola in 1994 for a statewide 800MHz trunked radio system. This project will be implemented in four phases with completion being projected for 2004. The city of Groton, Connecticut installed computers in law enforcement and other public safety vehicles. These terminals are equipped to send data over Bell Atlantic Mobile Systems' (BAMS) CDPD network. BAMS asserts that CDPD provides a faster rate of data transfer with three second response times being reported. The city has negotiated a fixed cost of $100 per month per vehicle for CDPD usage.
The North Carolina Highway Patrol recently established a statewide 800 MHZ public safety mobile data network. This agency received a grant from the Governor's Crime Commission for $500,000 plus an additional amount of $2 million from the 1996 General Assembly. These funds were used to initiate the first phase of the CJIN Mobile Data Network project (CJIN-MDN) which will provide voice and data coverage for those agencies in the I-85 and I-95 corridors.
This project is vitally important for advancing the CJIN study's recommendation to establish a statewide mobile voice and data network. Currently, many law enforcement officials are incapable of communicating with other agencies within their own county, much less across the entire state. The CJIN-MDN will allow officers from different agencies and various locations to communicate with one another. Officers will also be able to quickly access accurate, complete, and up-to-date statewide criminal history data directly from laptop computers or mobile data terminals.
Benefits to families of law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty should be increased so that state benefits equal what is currently provided by federal sources ($134,571). Education benefits should be included as well.
Current benefits total less than $190,000, with a monthly supplement for 400 weeks for a spouse or minor child (until age 18) based on the officer's salary. Of that, $134,000+ is federal money. Many other states provide college tuition and room and board at state-supported colleges and universities for the surviving spouse and children. North Carolina should be at least as committed to the families of its slain officers as the federal government is.
At the request of the Law Enforcement Committee, the Governor's Crime Commission is asking the General Assembly to increase the penalty for speeding to elude arrest to felony status.
Speeding to elude arrest is currently only a misdemeanor. Such incidents pose a grave danger to law enforcement and the driving public and have resulted in a number of deaths. The penalty should be increased to a felony. Evidence from other states indicates that raising the penalty will reduce the number of chases. Two bills addressing this issue, House #H0434 and Senate #S0925, need to be reintroduced.
Additional probation officers are clearly needed. The issue is not just a need for more probation officers, but a need for more intensive and high risk officers who carry smaller case loads and provide greater supervision.
Several factors are driving this demand for additional probation officers. First, under structured sentencing, more judges are using intensive probation as the sanction of choice. Further demand is placed on probation officers with the passage of the constitutional amendment which allows the judge to actually sentence an offender to alternative sanctions. Additionally, during its 1996 session, the legislature passed new laws that increased the length of supervision for sexual offenders. For every person in prison, four are on probation and parole living in communities across the state. At the same time, the public is demanding a higher level of control over probationers and parolees living in the community. How we supervise this population has a major impact on the safety of North Carolina citizens.
The General Assembly should increase the appropriation for multi-jurisdictional drug task forces above the current level of funding so that the entire state can be included. Currently, $250,000 in the continuing budget is designated for the First Congressional District only. Local manpower, especially in rural areas and small towns, is frequently insufficient, making a multi-jurisdictional drug task force an efficient and cost-effective way to use available resources.
The General Assembly should consider setting aside monies to be used as matching funds by agencies and departments who apply for grants but are unable to match funds locally.
Quite often when the Crime Commission assists municipalities with grant requests, the process comes to an abrupt halt once the matching funds requirement is mentioned. Many municipalities cannot come up with these funds. On other occasions grants have been awarded only to be turned down at the local level due to lack of matching funds. This keeps grant money from areas with obvious needs.