Governor's office will withhold grants for counties not updating criminal histories

The Governor's office will begin restricting grant money to jurisdictions that don't upload sufficient crime data into the state system, according to a story from the Corpus Christi Caller Times that could almost certainly be localized in many other Texas jurisdictions ("State warns of grant cuts for Coastal Bend Law Enforcement," Jan. 6):

Nueces County law enforcement agencies could lose about $2.5 million in funding by 2013 should they fail to meet a Sept. 1 deadline for uploading criminal histories into a statewide database.


The bite out of the Nueces County Sheriff's Office and Corpus Christi Police Department could be as high as $213,000 if officials don't upload data from 90 percent of all adult criminal cases that originated between 2006 and 2010, Nueces County government affairs director Tyner Little said.

Nueces County has uploaded 84 percent of the cases from that period of time, according to data provided by the governor's office.

Information such as a suspect's arrest date, charge and final disposition is uploaded to the Texas Department of Public Safety's Texas Criminal Information Center, a real-time database accessible to law enforcement agencies and prosecutors.

Law enforcement agencies statewide were warned of the potential grant cuts in a memo sent last month by the governor's criminal justice division.

Officials from the county information technology department met Thursday with representatives from the district attorney, sheriff's and district clerk's offices as well as city police officials to determine why the data is lagging.

"The problems are all over the map," Little said.

Last year, the state auditor issued a report listing counties (pdf, p. 35) that failed to submit dispositions for arrests from two years ago, finding many agencies' data woefully incomplete. Judging from that data, this will be a big challenge for many counties, including most of the big ones except Harris.

Related: Dismissals, outcomes, often don't make it into state criminal history database.