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On-Line Booking System for the New York City Police Department (From Law Enforcement Data Processing Symposium - Fifth Annual, P 81-100, 1981 - NCJ-88595)

NCJ Number
88598
Author(s)
R J Noonan
Date Published
1981
Length
19 pages
Annotation
New York City's On-Line Booking System (OLBS) has reduced the time for developing booking information and retrieving the information, and the proposed interface with the Prosecution Management Information System (PROMIS) will provide more benefits.
Abstract
When an arresting officer presents a prisoner at the central booking facility, a Polaroid photo is taken of the prisoner, and he/she is placed in a holding pen. The arresting officer gives the following information to a data entry clerk, who makes the entries on a CRT: arresting officer ID number, the name, race, sex, and date of birth of the arrestee, and the changes. The system returns on the same CRT the arrest number, the arresting officer's rank, name, and command, the age of the arrestee, the number of possible local warrant 'hits,' the charges sorted in hierarchy of seriousness, and the literal name of each charge. At this point, the printed output includes a worksheet which becomes the source document for later data entry, a prisoner movement form (the Polaroid photo is attached to this form), and a list of the possible local warrant 'hits.' The arresting officer completes the worksheet while the prisoner is fingerprinted. The prisoner is turned over to central booking personnel for further processing while the arresting officer brings the worksheets and the fingerprint cards to the supervisor for review. After the supervisor's approval, the worksheet and fingerprint cards are given to a terminal operator. The operator selects which combination of forms will be generated. All forms are produced on a relatively high speed line printer. The system provides speed of processing, legibility, and accuracy. The data entered into the system is available on-line without delay. Court subpoenas are produced from a printout. The proposal to interface OLBS with PROMIS will make booking data available on-line to the prosecutor's office while making court processing information on each defendant available to the police. Elements of the old and new systems are compared.