Court Early Warning Project

About the Program

Category: Criminal Justice and Public Safety (Best in Category)

Year: 2018

The Court Early Warning Project is a technology improvement project undertaken by the Chesterfield County Sheriff’s Office with the cooperation of the Chesterfield County Information System Technology Department, Chesterfield County Police Department, and the Virginia Supreme Court. The program assists in improving courtroom security by automating wanted checks of litigants coming before the court against the local wanted database in real time. Previously dockets were printed out weeks in advance and checked manually. This time-consuming process took over 30 hours a week to complete and only checked a portion of the dockets before the courts. Printing out the dockets weeks in advance included cases that were ultimately plead out or continued or generated false positives due to warrants being served during the time lapse and not having the ability to check against personal identifiers. The previous process cost the Chesterfield Sheriff’s Office approximately $25,000 annually in personnel cost against a cost to implement of $41,000. Since implementation over 3800 names are checked on average weekly yielding an average of 64 positive hits against the wanted files. This represents a 5% increase of names checked with a 36% increase of positive responses from previous results.