TRIAL COURT SOFTWARE SO DELAYED IT’S “A DEATH OF 1000 CUTS,” RISK TO OFFICERS’ SAFETY

By DEBRA HAIGHT
BCR Correspondent
ST. JOSEPH, MI – A new agreement between the Berrien County Sheriff’s Department and the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement department was one of several topics addressed at last week’s Berrien County Board of Commissioners meeting. Commissioners also heard updates about the Berrien County Trial Court’s new case management software as well as proposed renovations to the Berrien County Juvenile Center in Berrien Township.
Sheriff Chuck Heit made public comments to clear up recent misunderstandings about the county’s immigration enforcement policies after a recent MLive article. There are three models local departments can follow when it comes to ICE cooperation: warrant service, jail enforcement and taskforce.
“We’re only doing the warrant service model,” he said. “It’s a practice we’ve done for many, many years. If there’s a hold on a person, we honor that hold like we do for out of county and out of state warrants. ICE has 48 hours to pick someone up in the jail.”
“We wouldn’t look at the taskforce model as we want to foster trust in the community,” Heit added. “We met with Homeland Security officials in Grand Rapids. They would only ask for assistance with a high risk person and that’s not something we do. We’ve met with faith and agriculture leaders to clear up some misunderstandings people had when they read the article.”
Commissioners spent the bulk of their Committee of the Whole meeting talking about the JWorks court software program. Commissioners expressed concern over what the lack of communication between the new JWorks system and other law enforcement systems means to staff and to the public.
The program, implemented more than a year ago, has been an ongoing subject of concern and controversy. The court’s computers no longer communicate directly with other entities such as the prosecutor’s office and the sheriff’s office. The trial court was previously using the same system as the prosecutor’s office but the two entities ended up choosing different software systems when it came to move on to a new system.
Trial Court Administrator Carrie Smietanka-Haney Smietanka-Haney admitted that getting court information on LEIN is nearly a year behind. County Board Chairman Mac Elliott said, “The real risk comes with this delay,” he said. “It’s a danger to the public and to officers. It’s a public safety risk to officers to stop someone [if] they don’t know if someone is a bad hombre.”
“I’m troubled by the fact that we are not able to communicate in real time nearly as effectively as we did 30 years ago,” County Board Chairman Mac Elliott said. “We spent a lot of money on something that is not as efficient as the old system … We wouldn’t have this in private business.”
Elliott called it a “death of a thousand cuts” with the computers in the courts, prosecutor’s office, and sheriff’s office not being able to communicate directly with each other and having to pay vendors more money to buy interfaces for the systems to communicate. The BCR recently reported on other issues with the court’s software – article found here.
County Commissioners also heard an update about renovations to the Berrien County Juvenile Center and to the health department offices in the Niles courthouse. The latter is set to be done in coming months at a cost of nearly $1 million, while repairs to the Juvenile Center may cost $5.3 million.
Commissioner Julie Wuerfel questioned the price tag for the work, asking whether it would be cheaper to buy, develop or take care of another building. She said that the $5.3 million boils down to $378,000 per juvenile detained, as the building’s capacity will max out at 14.
The county is not locked in to repairing that facility, only for paying for the design work done so far, and the board will make the final decision after receiving bids due by early June. The money for both projects is coming from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds the county received.