VSP Central Criminal Records Exchange; removal and repeal of certain reporting requirements.
SB956 amends Virginia law governing the Department of State Police’s Central Criminal Records Exchange. The bill keeps the Exchange’s core duties of receiving, classifying, and filing criminal history record information, but updates and narrows reporting obligations tied to “unapplied” criminal history record information—records that have not yet been matched and entered into a person’s criminal history file. It requires the Exchange to continue sending periodic reports to courts, prosecutors, and law-enforcement agencies, and it specifies the contents and frequency of those reports, including quarterly reports to the Supreme Court’s Executive Secretary, clerks, and Commonwealth’s attorneys, and monthly reports to law-enforcement agencies.
The bill also directs the Exchange to review unapplied records and make reasonable efforts to apply them to criminal history records, while allowing it to seek cooperation from courts, prosecutors, law enforcement, corrections, forensic science, and probation/community corrections agencies to resolve identification problems, inconsistencies, errors, or omissions. In addition, the Exchange must submit an annual report to the Governor and General Assembly describing the status of unapplied criminal history record information, the causes of unresolved records, and efforts made to correct them, including related fingerprinting policy updates.
SB956 amends § 19.2-388 of the Code of Virginia and affects the operations and reporting duties of the Central Criminal Records Exchange within the Department of State Police. Its practical impact is to refine how criminal history record information is tracked, reported, and reconciled across Virginia’s criminal justice system, especially for offenses that cannot immediately be matched to a criminal history record. The bill primarily affects state police, court clerks, prosecutors, law-enforcement agencies, corrections agencies, and related justice-system offices that submit or receive these reports.
The bill appears to have been broadly supported and noncontroversial. It moved through the Senate and House with unanimous or near-unanimous votes, including 13-0 in Senate committee, 39-0 on final Senate passage, 21-0 in House committee, 97-0 in the House, and 39-0 on Senate concurrence with House amendments. The voting pattern suggests strong agreement that the reporting and record-matching process needed clarification or streamlining.
No major opposition is reflected in the available record, and there are no committee transcripts indicating substantive debate. The only likely point of policy interest is the balance between administrative burden and record-keeping accuracy: the bill reduces or refines certain reporting requirements while preserving oversight and efforts to reconcile unapplied criminal history information. Any concern would likely have centered on whether the Exchange and local justice agencies can continue to maintain accurate records without excessive reporting demands, but the unanimous votes indicate that any such concerns were minimal or resolved.