Bond Hearing Automation Project

About the Program

Category: Information Technology (Best in Category)

Year: 2012

The Miami-Dade Police Department’s (MDPD) Information Technology Services Bureau was tasked with automating the manual bond hearing process. This consists of preparing morning and afternoon bond hearing reports, seven days a week, year-round. The reports contain information about arrestees and are used by the presiding judge in their hearing to determine the bond to be set. Prior to automation, it would take two MDPD Central Records Bureau (CRB) employees six hours to generate the morning report, and one employee four hours to generate the afternoon report. Now all three employees are freed up to perform other tasks, thus resulting in a productivity gain without affecting MDPD’s budget. The project consists of a complex piece of software that communicates with the MDPD’s Criminal Justice Information System (CJIS), as well as the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s (FDLE) Florida Criminal Information Center (FCIC) system, and the National Law Enforcement Telecommunication Systems (NLETS) via the National Criminal Information Center (NCIC) system. Bond hearing calendar information and arrestee rap sheet information is gathered from these various systems and then provided to the State Attorney’s Office (SAO), who in turn provides this information to the presiding judge in the hearing. The Bond Hearing application provided a cost-effective, time-saving solution for generating the Bond Hearing report. By automating this process, CRB personnel are able to more efficiently address work backlogs within other functional areas.