Criminal
Justice
Integration
of Law Enforcement, Detention and Court Services Systems
Case-in-Point:
Minnesota's Ramsey County Criminal Justice
System
Summary:
Criminal justice system integrates data from
disparate county, state and federal systems. New front-end
streamlines administration of warrants, criminal history,
court dispositions and jail management. The accuracy
of maintaining criminal history has increased from 65%
to 100%.
Integration
Challenge
Ramsey
County is the second largest county in Minnesota, with
a population of 500,000. Like many of its local government
counterparts, Ramsey County was facing
ever-tightening criminal justice budgets while criminal
activity was increasing. The 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.
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
manually look-up past bookings to update criminal history
with court judgments. Only about 65% of the cases were
correctly matched.
Ramsey
County wanted to provide comprehensive and timelier
information to the State of Minnesota. Key objectives
included: giving users a logical view of information
regardless of where the information resides; improved
accuracy; reducing the time and effort County employees
spent entering redundant data across several systems;
and eliminating subjective judgments.
Solution
Ramsey
County appointed Computer Task Group (CTG), a systems
integrator, to design and develop an integrated criminal
justice system. A full life cycle approach using CTG's
C/S Method and "best practices" provided the foundation
and infrastructure. Existing Ramsey County systems were
replaced with an Oracle/PowerBuilder application called
the Court Interface Module, which was modified to meet
Ramsey County 's law enforcement requirements. CTG selected
MitemView to integrate the new Court Interface Module
with the state and federal IBM and Bull mainframe systems.
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