Wichita — A state system automatically alerting parole officers of their parolees' arrests is expected to be operational by year's end, four years after the brutal murder that prompted it.
The new system will send an electronic alert, probably an e-mail, to a parole officer if one of his parolees is apprehended, said Gordon Lansford, director of the Kansas Criminal Justice Information System.
But for the new system to work, more law enforcement agencies will have to join the Criminal Justice Information System, Lansford said. About two-thirds of the state's law enforcement agencies, mostly small police departments, have not joined the free system, he said.
Currently, parole officers rely on less systematic checks, like a visual scan of arrest lists, or on parolees themselves, to notify them of an arrest. Sometimes an arrest goes unnoticed.
That's what happened in 1998, when Wichita parolee Stanley Elms was arrested on a drunken-driving charge and released from the Sedgwick County jail. Parole officers apparently missed Elms' name on an arrest roster.
Three weeks later, while on a four-day drug binge, he raped and murdered next-door neighbor Regina Gray, authorities say. He's now on death row.
If his parole officer had known about the DUI arrest, Elms could have had increased supervision and drug testing.
After Gray's death, the Kansas Department of Corrections said it hoped to have an automated alert system in place by the beginning of 1999.
But assembling the technology has taken more time than expected, said Kyle Smith, spokesman for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, one of the agencies involved in the project.
Delays occurred after contractors went bankrupt and had to be replaced. The project also was delayed because it has been expanded to allow access by smaller law enforcement agencies, Lansford said.
The new system involves matching an identifier a name, a date of birth, a Social Security number, an address to a parolee name in a database.
When arrest information is electronically entered into the system, it would search the database, find a match and trigger an e-mail to the parole officer.
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