In Support of National Law Enforcement Data Exchange (N-DEx)

Enacted: Dec 2010

WHEREAS, the United States (U.S.) law enforcement community as a whole has articulated the need for a methodology and system to collect and share incident, arrest, booking, and other justice information necessary to help correlate suspects with crimes, increase the potential for improving case clearance rates, and other purposes of the justice system; and

WHEREAS, N-DEx envisions the ability to share complete, accurate, timely and useful information across jurisdictional boundaries to law enforcement and community corrections, and;

WHEREAS, N-DEx is a criminal justice information sharing system that provides nationwide connectivity to disparate local, state, tribal, and federal systems for the exchange of information, and;

WHEREAS, ownership of data shared through N-DEx remains with the agency that provided it and N-DEx supplies controls to allow agencies to decide what data to share, who can access it, and under what circumstances, and;

WHEREAS, all information listed through N-DEx must be confirmed by the source before it can be acted on, and;

WHEREAS, information available through N-DEx will provide essential information to pretrial, probation and parole officers in their investigations of individuals for release, sentencing and supervision decisions, and;

WHEREAS, future iterations of N-DEx will incorporate the full criminal justice community with an ultimate goal of transforming all criminal justice data into knowledge for the entire justice community, and;

WHEREAS, the International Association of Chiefs of Police Criminal Justice Information Systems (CJIS) Committee, the Federal Bureau of Investigation Criminal Justice Information System Advisory Policy Board (APB) Information Sharing Subcommittee, and the Global Justice Criminal Intelligence Coordinating Council(CICC) as well as many other organizations have all approved and promoted the use of the N-DEx Information Exchange Package Documentation (IEPD) as the national standard for the sharing incident, arrest, booking, and other justice information;

NOW THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED, that the American Probation and Parole Association supports full implementation of N-DEx with all state, tribal and federal community corrections entities to fully establish information sharing with privacy safeguards across all authorized law enforcement agencies and suggests that these agencies implement internal measures to ensure that the quality of data collected and stored in their internal records management systems, and ultimately shared through the N-DEx IEPD, represents the most complete and accurate information possible.

N-DEx (Law Enforcement National Data Exchange) brings together data from law enforcement agencies throughout the United States, including incident and case reports, booking and incarceration data, and parole/probation information. N-DEx detects relationships between people, vehicles/property, location, and/or crime characteristics. It “connects the dots” between data that is not seemingly related. And it supports multi-jurisdictional task forces—enhancing national information sharing, links between regional and state systems, and virtual regional information sharing.