Pasco Criminal
Records Just A
Click Away
By By Jamal Thalji
Long ago, in a county not
so far away — okay, it was
last month in Pasco —
criminal dockets could be
accessed only two ways:
You could use a dial-up
modem (Google it) that
would allow you to look up
the dockets — stuff like
criminal court dates and
defendant's names. Or you
had to drive to government
offices in Dade City and
New Port Richey and look
it up by typing onto an MSDOS
screen (look it up on
Wikipedia.com.)
But not anymore. The last
piece of Pasco's digital puzzle
has finally — and silently
— fallen into place:
Pasco County's criminal
records are now online for
all to see.
"Oh my gosh, people love
it," said Chief Deputy Clerk
of the Court Paula O'Neil.
"It's so easy to use."
Far easier to use than the
nearly three-decade old
Criminal Justice Information
System (or CJIS), a
Byzantine behemoth of a
computer mainframe that's
all keystrokes, no mouse
clicks.
For years Pasco residents
have become accustomed
to accessing all kinds of
public records instantly
online from the offices of
the property appraiser, tax
collector and supervisor of
elections.
Last year the Pasco County
Sheriff's Office joined the
digital age with a Web site
that lets the public check
who's in jail and why deputies
were in their subdivision.
The Clerk of the Court's
Web site has long enabled
public access to civil dockets:
to check court dates
and key rulings in divorce,
guardianship and civil
cases.
Surrounding Pinellas,
Hillsborough and Hernando
counties have had those
online capabilities and one
more: criminal records you
could read on the Internet.
But until June 19, criminal
records could not be accessed
online via the Pasco
clerk's Web site. Not until
5:30 p.m. that June day,
when the Clerk of the Court
changed its Pascoclerk.com
site so that a few clicks
would allow online access
to criminal records.
"We've been stealthy about
it because we have about
10 attorneys using it on a
trial basis," O'Neil said.
Those lawyers have already
found errors — some
defendant's names seem to
be missing online — which
the Clerk's Office will work
on with an eye on a more
public debut later this
month.
There wouldn't be a criminal
justice system in Pasco
without CJIS. There would
be no place to store case
numbers, nowhere to check
court dates and no way for
officers, lawyers and judges
to do their jobs.
But at least they could access
CJIS at work. Some
lawyers even paid for dialup
access. But the larger
public — especially residents
in fast-growing central
Pasco — had to drive to
east or west Pasco to look
up criminal records themselves.
CJIS hasn't been replaced
— that's another feat
county officials are still
working on. Instead, CJIS
data from 1990 on has been
made available for online
viewing.
The agencies that control
CJIS gave the Clerk's Office
permission to put the
data online in March 2007.
Doing so didn't require any
significant extra expenditures,
O'Neil said, but they
did get plenty of technical
help from the Florida Association
of Court Clerks and
Comptrollers.
The toughest task proved
to be keeping information
that is not public — juvenile
records, the identities
of certain victims — from
appearing online.
"It was like moving a
mountain to get that data
from a mainframe to something
you can search
(online,)" O'Neil said. "It
was a huge process."
New Port Richey civil attorney
Gary Davis is one of
the early testers. He remembers
accessing CJIS
when it first came online,
when he was a young
prosecutor.
"The last time I saw a CJIS
screen it looked just like it
did back in 1980," Davis
said.
But not anymore.
"It was the missing piece,"
Davis said. "But now we
have everything available."
