Delaware

In the State of Delaware, all law enforcement use one unified system for documenting all complaints for service including criminal investigations. When any officer in the State, regardless of the agency they represent, investigates a crime and they either apprehend or develop a suspect, the officer documents the incident in the Delaware Law Enforcement Investigative Support System (LEISS). This interactive, module driven user interface allows the officer to collect and document all information pertaining to the matter.

When sufficient minimal information is obtained and the officer wishes to obtain a warrant, information from what they have already collected is transferred into the automated warrant application and with minimal editing, the affidavit of probable cause and the warrant application itself can be transmitted immediately to the Justice of the Peace (JP) Court. The JP Court is the lowest level court of our unified court system and is the beginning point for all police warrant applications. When the electronic warrant is submitted to the court, the Judge is able to review the document online and approve it by appending their bar-number to the document; the equivalent of an electronic signature for approving the warrant.

Once approved, the electronic warrant is automatically appended to the local warrant file and if the charge is a felony (Delaware enters only felonies and certain serious misdemeanors into NCIC) the system has pre-agreed extradition limitations set depending on the severity of the charge. When the warrant is appended to the warrant file in Delaware, the extradition limitation field (EXL) is populated based on the law-file matrix previously agreed to by the Attorney General’s Office and any value in the EXL field will automatically send the warrant information directly to NCIC without any human intervention.

Upon entry to the NCIC Warrant File, NCIC will send back the NIC number (the unique number identifying that warrant in NCIC) and the Delaware Message Switch then captures the NIC number and appends it to the companion warrant entry in the local wanted person file. This is done to keep the two systems in sync. All maintenance of the warrants in NCIC are done through the local file. Any CANCEL, CLEAR, or MODIFY is handled at the local file and this same action is sent to NCIC where the change is also made on the companion NCIC warrant.