Benefits

The advantages of increasing criminal justice information sharing capabilities are unlimited for the vendor community, the law enforcement community, and the state of Connecticut. These benefits are largely derived from the ability of CISS to facilitate information movement throughout the criminal justice community, allowing for relevant information to be located and retrieved with minimal effort.


The benefits of CISS include the following:

• Complies with CGS § 54-142s by creating a comprehensive, state-wide information technology system to facilitate the immediate, seamless and comprehensive sharing of information between all appropriate state and local criminal justice agencies, departments, boards and commissions.
  
  
• Improves officer and public safety through improved accuracy, quick access, and completeness of criminal justice information.

• Strengthens justice decisions based on accurate, complete, and timely information.

• Quickly notifies appropriate criminal justice personnel of key events, as a crime deterrent.

• Provides a clearinghouse for arrest activity within the state of Connecticut.

• Streamlines the arrest, misdemeanor summons, and infraction violations processes, reducing errors and redundant data capture, and eliminating and/or minimizing manual paper transfer between law enforcement and judicial agencies. The result is lower administrative costs and increased system and workflow efficiencies.

• Transmits arrest, misdemeanor summons, infraction violations, and associated documentation in an electronic format that would integrate with other states’ Criminal Justice Information Systems using messaging that conforms to nationally recognized standards.

• Enables the sharing of criminal justice data compliant with national and federal standards, and with agencies in other states.

 

Value


The tangible benefits of connecting to CISS can be estimated by the value derived from the automated exchange of data between systems. The traditional information exchange process is slow and potentially error prone, with data is being keyed in multiple times. First, an officer generates hard copy paperwork. This paperwork is internally submitted for approval. The clerical staff prepares the transmittal documents and a police officer physically drives to the court house, hands the paperwork to the clerk’s office where the information is manually entered into the system. The action of physically transporting the paperwork takes the officer away from his patrol or other duties. A docket number is assigned, and the offender is assigned an arraignment date. The clerk from the law enforcement agency must pick up the disposition, transport it back to their office, and they may or may not enter it into their RMS system. This process could take several days, even up to a week to complete.
CISS will replace the manual process with electronic transmittal and search ability that will reduce hard copy paperwork, reducing errors and loss of information, reduce travel between law enforcement agencies and the courts, and provide historical as well as the most current data in near real time.


The total projected capital and operational cost of the CISS project is $37,810,000 through fiscal year 2015, and the expected value added to the state for the same time period is $59,000,000. Cost savings are expected to increase annually as more data exchanges are added to the system further reducing the time required of the CJIS community to share critical information. Annual cost savings will far exceed operational costs after 2015.