According to Raymond Foster, criminal justice information includes nearly every type of information gathered throughout the entire criminal justice process. It would include information gathered not just from the police, but also from “court transcripts of testimony, parole or probation records, state driver’s license records, privately gathered information, or police calls for service.” (Foster, 2005). Criminal justice information is used for strategic and tactical decision making throughout the criminal justice process from arrest through court services and adjudication, corrections, and parole or probation. It can be used by courts to issue appropriate sentences. It can be used by parole or probation officers in order to provide for a smoother re-entry to the community with the appropriate services being offered to the parolee. It can be used by research staff to project future police staffing needs, to provide statistics on the effectiveness of currently implemented police and correctional strategies. It can be used by public policy officials to create new laws or revisit or ones.
Police records management, on the other hand, deals primarily with information that the police use. This would exclude anything like a court transcript or privately gathered information. Information that is specific to police use such as a possible suspect’s prior criminal offense history, a driver’s license record check, the outstanding warrants for a particular suspect would all be included in police records management but anything beyond specific police interaction would not. A police records management system will have little or nothing to do with corrections and probation or parole. It may contain booking information for arrested suspects but would not include the court transcripts of what happened at any suspects hearings.
Reference:
Foster, Raymond (2005). Police Technology.
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