Fighting Crime with Information: Improved safety comes with integrating criminal justice information systems, but the process isn't easy. And it takes money.

• Author: Harrison, Blake

Minnesota Representative Richard Stanek, a veteran of the Minneapolis police force, was the watch commander on the night of Sept. 29, 1997, when a women was fatally shot by her ex-husband. At first this tragedy seemed to be another inevitable, brutal crime.

But in the days that followed, it became obvious that the murder might have been prevented if judges and prosecutors knew the killer's complete criminal record. The murder occurred while the man was out on bail, awaiting sentencing, just three weeks after he was convicted of killing his ex-wife's new boyfriend. In addition, and unbeknownst to the judge who approved his release, the man previously had been arrested for threatening his ex-wife with a gun and had been convicted of robbery in 1995.

If the criminal justice system failed in this case, it was not the result of careless police work or lack of scrutiny on the part of the judge. It stemmed from the lack of information exchange among criminal justice agencies and officials. These early crimes occurred in different counties within Minnesota, preventing the sentencing judge from having all relevant information. At that time, the state's criminal information system was incapable of tracking an offender's status and record throughout Minnesota's 87 counties.

"Every time I talk to an official about integrated criminal justice, they have a similar story highlighting the need to bring criminal databases up to speed," Stanek said. "The technology is available. We just have to have the political will to put the right kind of system in place."

Stanek, along with other lawmakers, agency officials and business leaders, has since worked to make Minnesota's system the best funded in the country and an example for other states.

The vision for an integrated criminal justice information system is grand, and yet basic. It is a system in which criminal justice personnel have, within minutes, each piece of information needed to make informed decisions. Planning for integration also addresses who can obtain what data, with built-in security and privacy safeguards.

The public, and even some elected officials, may assume that in the information age such a system already exists. But pertinent data like outstanding warrants, protective orders, child support orders, sexual offender registration requirements, and the status of probation and drug treatment is often maintained in separate databases by different agencies, often at different levels of government.

"There is a very wide gap between public expectation and the reality of these systems," says Joe Lehman, head of the Washington Department of Corrections. He says that paroled offenders often have...