Police agencies nationwide now have better access to Kansas’ criminal records, Kansas Bureau of Investigation leaders said Tuesday.

Kansas this week became the eighth state to connect to the FBI’s National Fingerprint File, which KBI officials said will give police in other states more streamlined and detailed access to Kansas criminal-history records.

“It’s simply a coordination between the state’s central repository and the FBI as to which is the holder of the better record,” said Dave Sim, special agent in charge of the KBI’s information services division.

Each year the KBI processes more than 130,000 criminal fingerprint records, which are collected when people are booked into jail and linked to people’s criminal-history information. Prior to this week, the KBI sent a duplicate fingerprint record and arrest record to the FBI for each felony and serious misdemeanor arrest made in the state.

When other states requested information about Kansas criminals, they’d get it directly from the FBI’s file. But the problem was that the FBI file wasn’t always as detailed as the file kept by the KBI – for example, it didn’t include the disposition of the arrest or the defendant’s address and employer.

“In most states, the state’s central repository has a better version of the record than that provided to the FBI and what the FBI maintains,” Sim said.

Now, only a suspect’s first set of fingerprints will be sent to the FBI, and the FBI won’t maintain a duplicate database for Kansas criminal-history records. Instead, the KBI will notify the FBI electronically every time a criminal is processed for a new arrest, and when information about a criminal is requested by another agency, the KBI can release it directly to them by a secure computer network.

“We take responsibility and a much greater role to release the records that originate in Kansas, so in most instances the agency that’s looking at a record is going to get a much better record now when Kansas responds,” Sim said.

The other states participating in the program so far are Florida, North Carolina, New Jersey, Oregon, Montana, Oklahoma and Colorado. The project was implemented in Kansas using a $25,000 federal grant, Sim said.