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Lawmakers debate scope and privacy limits of proposed criminal justice data warehouse
Summary
Representative Bill Mercer said House Bill 890 would require agencies to coordinate criminal-history contributions to a data warehouse to support analytics like recidivism studies; DOJ and state criminal-information officials warned about confidential NCIC/biometric data and urged reliance on public court records or statutory authorization for repository access.
House Bill 890 aims to clarify which agencies will supply criminal-history data to a state criminal justice data warehouse and to require an interagency decision by Oct. 1 on responsibility for providing that information. Representative Bill Mercer told the committee the intent is to assemble data useful for policy analysis—especially recidivism—by including court dispositions and correctional treatments.
The Department of Justice and the Division of Criminal Investigation cautioned that the state’s criminal repository contains confidential biometric and arrest records protected by federal and state law; releasing NCIC or biometric data without specific statutory authority could make agencies criminally liable. "It's a misdemeanor under Montana law to release CCJI to someone or an entity who's not entitled to obtain it," testified Selene Koepke, assistant attorney general.
Anne Dormady, crime-information bureau chief, described how court dispositions are manually entered into the state repository and noted that courts' public filing system could feed much of the needed public data without exposing confidential biometric records. Committee members asked whether de-identified identifiers would support longitudinal analysis; sponsors argued that de-identification would prevent tracking recidivism across time, while opponents said public-record dispositions might be sufficient for many analytics.
The transcript records detailed technical questions and no final committee vote during the hearing portion; later in executive action the committee considered other bills and returned to data-warehouse policy questions off the record.
