Montana panel reports progress on criminal justice data warehouse pilot, seeks more county participation

State data officials on the Law and Justice Interim Committee presented progress on Montana’s Justice Data Warehouse pilot, describing technical work completed in Ravalli County and next steps to expand statewide access.

“My name is Kayla Bragg … and I’m the executive director with the Montana Board of Crime Control,” Kayla Bragg told the panel as she introduced the project’s goals: bring siloed criminal‑justice records into a single, usable system to help lawmakers, funders and operators make policy decisions.

Janice Friess, director of the Statistical Analysis Center, said the pilot has produced early operational wins. “For Ravalli County law enforcement data, we have about 85% of their data in the data warehouse,” she said, listing computer‑aided dispatch, records management (arrest/report) and jail management system feeds as the primary sources now onboarded.

Adam Carpenter, the state’s chief data officer, described the technology stack and an intentional “no‑wrong‑door” approach to ingestion: Snowflake as the state platform, pipeline tools such as Fivetran where feasible, and fallback methods for agencies without APIs. “We don’t want to require counties to change their production processes,” Carpenter said, arguing the design reduces burden on local partners and minimizes rework when adding counties.

Presenters outlined the near‑term work: complete remaining API extractions from Central Square for Ravalli, templatize the integration and master‑record logic, finalize MOUs with courts and clerks (Quartz and district clerks were named), establish AWS environments for multiple ingestion methods, and hire a project manager and data‑warehouse architect.

Committee members asked how the warehouse will handle gaps between arrest data and prosecutorial filings. Representative Kelly said her county attorney prosecutes roughly one‑third of filed cases, and asked how that disparity will be reflected. The presenters said prosecuting offices are welcome participants; some offices still rely on paper and practices vary, so staff will continue outreach and consider additional data sources to fill gaps.

Public commenter May Simmons praised the work and cautioned that implementation will require significant hours and careful testing.

The panel did not seek legislative action at this meeting; staff said the next steps are completing Ravalli County work, finishing the MOU process, ramping QA, and onboarding the remaining project hires.