Please note that these materials are provided for historical purposes only. The information presented is out of date and may be neither accurate nor useful. External hyperlinks may no longer be valid. For current court technology information, please see the new Court Technology Bulletin.
March/April 1997 Volume 9 Number 2
Say "Cheers" in LA: A Consolidated Criminal History Reporting System
Los Angeles County has the largest municipal justice system in the country. It encompasses 50 law enforcement agencies, 62 additional authorities (such as railroad and university patrols), 21 different city attorney/prosecutors' offices, and 24 municipal court districts, including some 300 judges and commissioners presiding over more than half a million arrests per year. And all of them, it seems, have their own information systems that are isolated from and incompatible with the others.
"They have different databases, they require different passwords, and you have to be granted access by the proprietor of each system, " says Los Angeles County Municipal Court Judge Kenneth Lee Chotiner. "If you are trying to put together a case history on an individual, you have to go in and out of eight different systems. If you are lightning fast, maybe in half an hour you’ll have pieced together part of what’s in existence, but there’s no guarantee that it will be accurate or complete. There are literally thousands of people with multiple records under four or five different names."
But on December 31, 1996, the county began rolling out its Consolidated Criminal History Reporting System (CCHRS), dubbed "Cheers." Now police, judges, prosecutors, probation officers, and the like will be able to have instant access to information in the various databases. Case histories will be not only far more complete but also easier to match conclusively with the accused party, which is more difficult to do than one might think.
According to Judge Chotiner, only about 20 percent of defendants seeking bail or release can be positively identified by the courts, and matching "points" on fingerprints leads to a positive identification only about two-thirds of the time. CCHRS solves that problem by bringing up a high-resolution photograph of an individual, along with his or her criminal record, and by taking advantage of livescan fingerprinting. Livescan fingerprinting uses laser technology and computerized print matching to identify individuals with an accuracy rate greater than 98 percent.
On the street level, CCHRS will help law enforcement officers change the way that they work as well. For example, if an investigator inputs the known details of a suspect—brown hair, tattoo on his forearm, and the first name "Bill"—CCHRS would sort through all the databases to generate a list of case histories in order of probable matches.
The system also indicates which agencies are interacting with or investigating the person, thus allowing better coordination among diverse entities within the justice system. Such improvements in efficiency, both in and outside of the courtroom, are expected to be so pronounced that an independent audit estimates that the program will pay for its development costs ($7 million over eight years) within just two or three years.
Besides increasing efficiency, the program will generate information that should enable judges to tailor responses to individuals cases. For example, during a bail hearing, the system can forewarn court personnel of relevant factors—such as suicide or escape risks—and help the judge decide whether to release the defendant on his own recognizance or to set a prohibitively high bail. Furthermore, since California is a "three-strikes" state, CCHRS includes a series of warning flags to let the judge, district attorney, and bailiff know that a defendant may be down to his last strike, allowing them to plan accordingly.
For more information about CCHRS, contact Judge Kenneth Lee Chotiner at (213) 974-7823.
Doug Lemov is a freelance writer for Governing magazine.
This excerpt from "Bringing Order to the Courts" from the February 1997 issue of Governing was reprinted with permission. ©1997 Governing Magazine.
Back to Court Technology Bulletin
Send comments to webmaster@ncsc.dni.us!
