MITEM Case Study - Ramsey County Criminal Justice
Ramsey County, which includes
the city of St. Paul, is the 2nd largest county in Minnesota
with a population of 1/2 million. As in most local governments
across the US, Ramsey County was facing ever constrained
budgets for criminal justice at a time when the criminal
activity in the County was increasing. Ramsey County's
objective was to increase the effectiveness of law enforcement,
detention, and court services by consolidating the diverse
criminal information systems at the county and state
levels while streamlining the process.
Business
Problem
The process
of issuing and managing warrants, bookings, court dispositions,
and criminal history were handled in different information
systems on disparate platforms. Sentencing for a convicted
criminal has become more complex in recent years. The
law which punishes repeat offenders for enhanceable
crimes requires complete and accurate history of court
dispositions for repeat offenders.
For example,
warrants issued in the state of Minnesota are entered
into the Honeywell BULL based TCIS (Total Court Information
System) application and the IBM based CJIS (Minnesota
Criminal Justice Information System).
The warrant, booking, and criminal
history systems were all on separate computing platforms,
each containing duplicate and inconsistent data.
"The process of looking
up individuals with outstanding warrants on the local
or state system and their criminal history was very
labor intensive and error prone," said Dave Fenner,
Sergeant, Ramsey County Sheriff's Department. Difficult
or inconsistent surname spellings and aliases used by
repeat offenders often required people to make judgment
calls in matching an individual with past criminal history
and outstanding warrants. Sharing data with the state
and nationwide criminal justice systems was a manual
process with inconsistent results. When final court
dispositions were issued, a batch printout was forwarded
to the county where individuals had to look up past
bookings to update criminal history with court judgments.
Only about 65% of the cases were correctly matched.
When a person
is being booked into a county jail, county personnel
check for outstanding state or federal warrants. Determining
whether individuals had outstanding warrants or criminal
history required the use of cryptic commands and multiple
systems. Difficult or different spellings of new and
repeat offenders using aliases required people to make
judgment calls in matching an individual with past criminal
history as well as doing repetitive searches.
Project
Goals
Ramsey County
wanted to provide comprehensive and more timely information
to the State of Minnesota. Users needed a logical view
of the information without knowing or caring which system
it resided in or how to get it. Improving accuracy and
reducing the time and effort County employees spent
entering redundant data across several systems and eliminating
subjective judgments from the process were also key
objectives.
The overall
objectives for this initiative were:
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Safer community (decreased crime rate). |
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100% disposition tracking (% booked and posted
to criminal history). |
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100% apprehension of suspects (warrant clearance
rate). |
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Court system integration (with incident tracking).
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Integration with other criminal justice agencies.
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100% victim notification on releases. |
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Reduced Reporting costs. |
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Reduced data entry (single entry) redundancy
and manual processing. |
Implementation
Computer
Task Group (CTG) was selected by Ramsey County through
a formal bid process to design and develop an integrated
criminal justice system to meet Ramsey County's user
objectives. The Cyber which managed bookings and warrants
was replaced with a new Ramsey County Criminal Justice
System using an Oracle database.
The new system
integrates data from multiple systems and eliminates
redundant data entry. The following criminal justice
activities are supported:
- Jail Management
- Criminal History
- Warrants
- Civil Process
"Integration in the Criminal
Justice industry is complex. There are several legacy
systems integration points that are required to facilitate
a comprehensive CJIS. Our job was to effectively build
a single system that would serve our customer so they
could better serve theirs -- the citizens of Ramsey
county," said Mike Engel, Engagement Manager, Computer
Task Group. In order to simplify the process and integrate
the new county criminal information system with CJIS
and TCIS, CTG recommended MitemView®
as a non-invasive approach (figure 2). "The choice
of MitemView was driven by our past experiences and
the fact that MitemView is the only tool of its kind
in the industry that could be counted on to bridge the
gap between legacy and new systems while meeting the
service level requirements for performance, availability
and reliability," said Engel.
Results
Employees
now enter booking information into the Court Interface
Module or CIM, attaching the booking to a master-name,
and entering address information. Court employees using
CIM initiate hearings. During this process, CIM automatically
enters plaintiff's data into TCIS using MitemView®.
TCIS automatically assigns a case number that is synchronized
with CIM and a hearing is created on the court docket.
Following a court hearing, judgements that include fines,
community service and jail time are entered into CIM.
Warrants are recorded in CIM which updates TCIS, the
State's Criminal Justice Information System - CJIS,
and the national NCIC using MitemView®
without the user re-keying the information. By using
MitemView®
to synchronize warrant, booking, and judgement information
with the TCIS, Ramsey County has seen the completeness
and accuracy of maintaining criminal history increase
from 65% to 100%.
"Sharing
criminal justice information among agencies has been
the dream of policymakers and users in Ramsey County
for several years. This project is a major step toward
accomplishing that goal and will ultimately make Ramsey
County a safer community."
Bob Fletcher
Sheriff, Ramsey County
"The new system greatly
streamlines the process of dealing with warrants, criminal
history, court dispositions, and jail management. This
new architecture will be the foundation on which we
build future integration projects at Ramsey County."
Dave Fenner
Sergeant, Support Services Unit, Ramsey County Sheriff's
Department
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