Enhancing Colorado's Infrastructure through a Jurisdiction-wide Effort to Capture and Transmit Palm, Tenprint and Photos of Offenders to the State Repository and the FBI.

The Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006 (AWA) (Pub. L. 109-248, 42 U.S.C. § 16901, et seq) authorizes the Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering, and Tracking (SMART) to administer sex offender management grants. These grants assist states, the District of Columbia, U.S. principal territories and tribal jurisdictions in developing and/or enhancing sex offender registration and notification programs that support substantial implementation of Title I of the AWA, known as the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA). SORNA was enacted to protect the public from convicted sex offenders and offenders against children by establishing a comprehensive national system for the registration of those offenders.

With SMART FY14 AWA grant funds, the Colorado Department of Public Safety will replace its Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) with an Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS). The implementation of ABIS will allow the Colorado Department of Public Safety to receive fingerprints, palm prints, and photographs. ABIS will help the state of Colorado overcome one of its greatest challenges to become fully compliant with SORNA requirements, which has been the lack of a statewide infrastructure for capturing and transmitting biometric offender data. ca/ncf