Courts, police create online filing system

Tracy Williams, executive director of the Rhode Island<br>Supreme Court Judicial Technology Center.
Tracy Williams, executive director of the Rhode Island
Supreme Court Judicial Technology Center.


The state of Rhode Island is at the halfway mark of a five-year initiative that will bring electronic files, payments and court cases online.



Tracy Williams, executive director of the state’s Supreme Court Judicial Technology Center or court chief technology officer, is spearheading an effort to link the state’s Traffic Tribunal Court, District Court, Workers’ Compensation Court, Superior Court, Family Court and Supreme Court into one “e-judicial” system.



The system, expected to be complete by 2006, will allow the public, attorneys and law enforcement using a Web browser to have access to public cases and court calendars and to pay tickets online.



“In five years, the public should have access to any public data in courts,” said Williams. “Right now, if you want to see information on a case you have to go to that court and get paper access. Now, we want to put out whatever the public has access to (at the courts) on the Internet and available online.”



There are several major initiatives underway, according to Williams, which includes everything from upgrading the Rhode Island Traffic Tribunal Court with a new system and converting civil applications from a Wang system to an Oracle system.



Another initiative is a conversion from a 3Com system to a Cisco networking platform. The state has already budgeted $6 million over two and a half years to that effort, which is expected to be complete in 2005.



A contract valued at $4.7 million will go to Dallas, Texas-based ACS, a provider of information technology outsourcing products. ACS will provide the centralized statewide information management system for the court.



Already, Williams has initiated the implementation of credit card payment use at the RITT.



The system has been up and running for the last three months.



“This includes payments to pay for court fines and costs, including traffic tickets,” Williams said.



Hoping to close the translation gap in Rhode Island, the state has also implemented the translation of court Web sites into eight languages.



One of the largest initiatives, which was started in 1998 and is still underway, is launching the J-Link Interface. J-Link will take data from police and transfer it to courts; the courts then will transfer the data to other courts and the Attorney General’s office.



Currently, if someone is arrested, the police officer fills out an arrest form, then one copy is kept at the police station and another copy is sent to Criminal Court.



The police enter the data into the system at the police department. A paper copy of the summons is sent to Municipal Court (if applicable). Another copy is sent to RITT court. The Municipal Court then enters the data into its system, as does the RITT court.



The same data has now been entered three times. Not only does it waste time, according to Williams, but it also opens up the opportunity for more human error.



A new system will allow police, attorneys and courts to all have access to the same information in real-time.



A pilot program has been underway for criminal complaints at both the West Warwick Police Department and the Coventry Police Department.



“We’ll roll it out in the next six months to 38 of the 41 arresting agencies throughout the state,” Williams said.



“Overall it’s going really well,” said Capt. Walter Hennessy of the Coventry Police Department. “Initially there were bugs in the system, but those have been worked out.”



Implementing the new system has been a learning curve for police, he said, but it’s all worth it.



Presently, every person who goes to court is assigned an arrest number and there is basic information associated with that arrest number including name, date of birth and address.



A copy of the information is sent to the courts and to the Attorney General’s office.



The old way of doing things also provided more windows for error, Hennessy said, because the information was being entered three different times. Now, once arrest information is entered into the IMC software system at the department “with a click of a button” the information is submitted to the court.



“What it does is (it) saves the court people duplicating efforts of the police department,” Hennessy said. “Now there is this interface between police computer system and courts.”



“There are also less handoffs or cracks in the process,” Williams said. “And not only can we get information from the police, we can also feed it back to them.”



The new system will provide the courts with an electronic way of sending information back to the police, including the deposition or result of a court case. In addition, it will help a police department keep a history on a criminal or individual by having information on all arrests and court cases, whether or not they were connected to that individual police department.



All of these efforts, according to Williams, are not measured in dollars, but instead are measured in convenience, time, and access.



“There are two things in government that technology should be doing — increasing productivity and increasing service to the public.”

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