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Montana board updates council on Justice Data Warehouse progress and hurdles
Summary
State crime‑data leaders told the Criminal Justice Oversight Council they have ingested nearly all Ravalli County data, hired a second data‑warehouse architect and are negotiating historic data access from Central Square — but legacy system variation and historic loads remain major obstacles.
Officials from the Montana Board of Crime Control and its Statistical Analysis Center told the Criminal Justice Oversight Council on June 27 that progress on the statewide Justice Data Warehouse is accelerating but still faces technical and staffing challenges.
Kayla Bragg, executive director of the Board of Crime Control, and Janice Friess, director of the Statistical Analysis Center, said the project has ingested nearly all of Ravalli County’s computer‑aided dispatch, records management and jail data and is building an integration layer to clean and harmonize raw inputs before presenting dashboards.
Friess said the team has hired a second data‑warehouse architect, which should speed work, and is negotiating with Central Square — a widely used vendor for law‑enforcement records — to obtain large historic data sets. She said pulling those records through the vendor API would be slow and that the team is therefore discussing bulk historic loads and a templatized process to repeat the effort county by county.
The presenters showed early internal visualizations that combine dispatch calls with case records to estimate how many calls become cases and the categories that most often convert to investigations. Friess cautioned the council that the sample is preliminary, the data are inconsistent across counties because Central Square is highly customizable at the local level, and the team plans to prioritize statutory fields (MCAs) and create data dictionaries so variables mean the same thing across jurisdictions.
Committee members asked whether the warehouse can follow individual people through arrest, conviction, incarceration and supervision. Friess said that linkage is a core goal — including initial linkages to corrections data — but that privacy protections for victims will limit identifiable outputs and that court MOUs are underway.
Chair Usher and several council members praised the work and asked staff to return with updates on Central Square negotiations, the schedule for historic loads, and a description of which fields will be standardized first. The board’s team also noted they are restarting recruitment for a project manager after a candidate declined to relocate.
The council did not take formal action on the update; members directed staff to provide a follow‑up in the July meeting and an outline of planned use cases for the warehouse.
