The Office of Justice Assistance announced today that the Wisconsin Justice Information Sharing (WIJIS) Justice Gateway is operational and sharing over 1.25 million files between 250 users. The Justice Gateway is a powerful online tool that expands how local police investigators and district attorneys share investigative data. The WIJIS Justice Gateway uses the most secure technologies available, allowing the Wisconsin justice community the ability to exchange critical information and track potential criminal and terrorist activity across the state.

"Crime does not stop at a county or city border, and with the WIJIS Gateway neither will our investigations," said OJA Executive Director David Steingraber. "With access to more detailed investigative information, police and prosecutors will have the tools they need to help reduce crime, prevent terrorism and keep our communities safe."

Information from the Sauk Prairie Police Department will be available in production beginning on Wednesday, September 5th. At the same time, WIJIS has now registered over 1,000 Wisconsin law enforcement officers as Gateway users.

The WIJIS Justice Gateway will be down for maintenance the morning of Wednesday, September 26th.

The WIJIS Justice Gateway staging/testing platform will be down for maintenance this evening, Monday, October 22nd.

The WIJIS Justice Gateway will be down for maintenance the morning of Wednesday, October 31st.

The WIJIS Justice Gateway will be down for maintenance from the evening of Tuesday, November 13th through the morning of Wednesday, November 14th.

With invaluable assistance from DOJ, WIJIS staff successfully completed the maintenance and updates to the Gateway this morning.

2007 was a banner year at WIJIS. 2008 is bringing some changes, but also some huge opportunities. Anyone interested in statewide access to prosecution case files? Read on.

Congratulations to Chief Resnick and his staff at Bayside Police Department for all of their hard work and continued efforts to make Wisconsin a safer place by joining the WIJIS Justice Gateway.

The WIJIS Program is in the process of creating a Gateway Use Case Dictionary to distribute the Gateway user community that highlights the various use cases of the Gateway. This idea was born from the mini-conferences we held this fall. Every place we went, we met individuals who used the Gateway for different purposes. We think it would be very helpful for our user community if we could share these ideas for everyone.

This invitation is open to any WIJIS Gateway user. To participate please send a list of the various purposes that you use the WIJIS Gateway to Jeff Sartin at jeff.sartin@wi.gov.

The WIJIS Gateway was temporarily down this morning from roughly 12:00 AM to 10:00AM. We are sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused you. We recommend that all submitting agencies check their records to ensure that any submissions sent during this outage period were successfully received by the Gateway.

If you have any technical questions related to the outage please contact Yogesh Chawla, yogesh(dot)chawla(at)wi(dot)gov or Jeff Sartin, jeff(dot)sartin(at)wi(dot)gov .

Thank you and once again, sorry for any inconvenience.

The WIJIS Team

The WIJIS Justice Gateway project is currently in its rollout phase, adding new users and data sources on a regular basis. In the past year, the WIJIS Justice Gateway has grown to include 2135 users with access to more then 4.2 million pointer records from 82 different local law enforcement agencies. Over 130 local law enforcement agencies are registered to search the WIJIS Gateay and rely upon the it as a valuable tool for accessing critical information that was previously unavailable. One of these organizations is the OJA SAFE Team.

The SAFE Team at OJA works with the Division of Corrections Sex Offender Registry attempting to locate non-compliant sex offenders. Once located, the team's mission is to either cause the offenders to re-establish compliance, or to provide actionable information to law enforcement to assist them in effecting an arrest.

The team has several on-line information resources at its disposal including public websites, law enforcement databases and a limited number of websites that are not publicly available. The team is always looking for additional information sources; and, WIJIS has proven to be an extremely rich source for team members. The addition of the DA Protect files has opened a new information stream through which members can locate current addresses, associates, and of course, pending charges. With each additional law enforcement agency joining in the information sharing, team members are better able to locate these felony offenders and help to bring them into compliance; or, to facilitate their arrest by law enforcement.

For more information on how to gain access to the WIJIS Gateway visit www.oja.wi.gov/WIJIS

As you may know, the Justice Gateway closes from 4:30 to 6:30 am on the 25th day of each month for periodic maintenance. Due to the holiday schedule for November, we are scheduling the November 2009 monthly maintenance for Tuesday, November 24, from 4:30 to 6:30 am. Please make a note of it!

Due to technical difficulties, the WIJIS staging platform (also known as the testing platform) will be temporarily unavailable to users starting at 12 pm today (December 29, 2009). We are working with DOJ to resolve this issue and will let you know as soon as the staging platform returns to normal use. Thank you.