WASHINGTON, D.C - In front of a full auditorium in Washington DC, and during the final day of SEARCH's tenth symposium on justice information technology, the Nevada Administrative Office of the Courts, Carson City District Attorney, Carson City Sheriff’s Department, New Dawn Technologies, SAIC, Teamworks Consulting, and the statewide court vendor demonstrated a working example of the Multi County Integrated Justice Information System (MC-IJIS).
MC-IJIS provides a single point of contact for communicating with all other justice agencies. It manages all types of documents and criminal justice data exchanges. MC-IJIS facilitates exchange of data while allowing each agency to implement and maintain its own system and control their own data. MC-IJIS is considered a candidate system for statewide integration by Nevada Homeland Security Council.
The presentation given by Ron Titus, Nevada State Court Administrator; Noel Waters, Carson City District Attorney, and Undersheriff Steve Albertsen of the Carson City Sheriff’s Office, demonstrated an example of data exchange and integration between the law enforcement jail and booking systems, New Dawn’s JustWare | Prosecutor, the JusticeBroker data exchange program, and the state court system, all through the SAIC created data warehouse.
MC-IJIS utilizes more than twenty XML based schemas for the commonly used transactions. For example, one schema allows the law enforcement system to submit the arrest and booking information to the JustWare agency. This allows all charging information, defendant physical descriptor information and contact information to be received electronically.
Once JustWare generates the charging document, MC-IJIS files information to the court system setting event information and pushing a court number back to JustWare.
Expanding MC-IJIS to include new schemas can be easily accomplished. For instance, future document types planned for MC-IJIS in Nevada include documents between courts and parole & probation agencies.
Currently, twenty-five agencies within four counties are participating in the MC-IJIS project. Without a centralized data exchange, at least forty-four separate interfaces would be required to connect the different operational systems, not including the interfaces that would be required to communicate with state-level systems. With MC-IJIS, the operational system of each agency needs to communicate with only one system.
“The work put forth by this group definitely illustrates the ability of criminal justice agencies to choose the best solutions for their local office goals and functions and still accommodate broader data sharing goals.” stated Tom Higgins, President and CEO.
Carson City District Attorney’s Office will be the first district attorneys office in the State of Nevada to officially Go Live with MC-IJIS which is slated for May of 2004.