Established in 1994 and expanded in 1999, New York State's DNA Data Bank is part of CODIS, the national Combined DNA Index System developed by the FBI. A "hit" refers to a match between a DNA profile taken from a forensic evidentiary sample submitted by a law enforcement agency as part of a criminal investigation and an offender's DNA profile stored on the Convicted Offender Index of the State DNA Data Bank. The first sections of this report describe the demographics of offenders matched with forensic DNA profiles; they also note the prevalence of offenders identified in hits who were "grandfathered" into the Data Bank as a result of the 1999 change in the law that required the indexing of offenders then serving a sentence for a qualifying conviction offense. Later sections of this report summarize the extent of offenders' prior involvement in the criminal justice system, their criminal justice status at the time of the hit, and the distribution of offenses associated with the hits. Where it was possible to track cases after the hit, the criminal justice processing outcomes are also reported. The final section of this report discusses the implications of these findings and offers recommendations for improved hit tracking, the expansion of the DNA Data Bank, and the utility of DNA Data Bank information in researching substantive areas of criminal justice policy. The report advises that although the State DNA Data Bank is one of the most important advances in criminal identification in recent years, the ability to monitor the performance of this system, to use it effectively in the formulation of policy, and to improve law enforcement operations cannot be fully realized until it is better integrated with other criminal justice information systems, including those that report on case processing and offender criminal histories. 9 notes