Rather than manually delivering paper referrals to their DA offices, most Wisconsin law enforcement agencies and all circuit courts now transfer that same information digitally. And rather than manually entering that information into their case management system, most DA offices now review it on-screen and accept it into PROTECT to create a new DA case or append it to an existing one.
A combination of interfaces between PROTECT and other justice partner systems enables three types of electronic referrals.
Contested citations
A state standard feature included with PROTECT and used by all DA offices.
Contested citations are sent to PROTECT through the existing interface with the case management system used in all Wisconsin circuit courts, which was created and is managed by the Wisconsin Circuit Court Access Program.
These referrals include non-criminal traffic citations and other fine or forfeiture-type citations, referred directly to the circuit courts by law enforcement, who establish a court case.
If/when the court case is updated to reflect a Not Guilty plea and the DA office as the prosecuting agency, the matter is then electronically sent/referred to PROTECT.
The information sent includes person demographic and identifier information, citation and statute details, and the court case number generated from the court's CMS.
The DA office accepts this referral into PROTECT; a DA case is automatically created, and the resulting DA case number is immediately sent to the court's CMS.
With each system now updated with the other's case number, information such as court appearance date/time/location, judge and defense attorney assignments, hearing notes, charge dispositions, and ultimately case dispositions are sent from the courts to PROTECT.
eCitations
A state standard feature included with PROTECT and used by all DA offices.
eCitations are sent to PROTECT from the Wisconsin Department of Transportation’s TraCS Traffic and Crash software, or TraCS, which is used by all Wisconsin State Patrol and almost all Wisconsin law enforcement agencies for issuing traffic citations, warnings, and recording crash data.
eCitations include both criminal and non-criminal traffic-related citations
To submit data electronically to PROTECT, the referring agency must use the TraCS software and be enabled by the Department of Transportation.
eReferrals
Included upon request and used only by participating law enforcement agencies.
Participation is voluntary and requires buy-in and cooperation from both the District Attorney and interested law enforcement agencies in their county.
Sometimes called "true eReferrals", this third type of electronic referral completes the picture and can transmit all other referred case types and supplemental documents not included with contested citations and eCitations.
Data transmitted is the same information commonly included in paper referral packets, most of which is maintained within the law enforcement agency's RMS. This includes:
- Incident date, time, location
- Defendant demographic, identifier, alias, contact information
- Victim and/or witness demographic, identifier, alias, contact information
- Referred charges, enhancers, modifiers
- Arrest date, agency, arrest tracking number (ATN)
- Photos, attachments, supporting documentation
- Officer narratives and any notes or incident reports
eReferrals may come from any number of law enforcement systems, as long as the data from those systems can be sent through the eReferral Interface, which uses the Global Justice XML Data Model (GJXDM) developed by the US federal government for the exchange of information within the justice and public safety communities.
Interested law enforcement agencies or IT professionals within those agencies can find technical specs and the GJXDM subset below:
Interested DA offices can share this page with their agencies, then contact the DAIT helpdesk to initiate a conversation.
There is no requirement for any DA office to use the eReferral feature, but there are benefits to digital files vs paper.
There is no charge to DA offices that wish to transition to eReferrals, but law enforcement agencies will need to work out costs with their own RMS vendor.
DAIT can answer questions from agencies and RMS vendors' IT staff and will also help set up, test, and implement with training provided by DAIT analysts.
