Dear Valued Members of the IJIS Community,
I hope all of you and your colleagues enjoyed a prosperous first quarter of 2023! I am writing you today as we reconstitute the IJIS newsletter to provide our community with quarterly updates on key initiatives for your knowledge and engagement. Moreso, we aim to recognize the invaluable work our community delivers to support the IJIS Institute’s mission.
Staff
In order to effectively meet new challenges daily, I am pleased to announce the hiring of three incredible resources to the IJIS staff. This includes a familiar face in Kathy Gattin, who will serve as our Membership Manager, Richard Fiore, Senior Project Manager, and Emmanuel Oladipupo, Project Manager. Please join me in welcoming them to the team, and I encourage you to visit our website to learn more about them, their expertise, and what they’ll be doing at IJIS.
Events
I am pleased to share that we recently held the first-ever Justice and Public Safety Cybersecurity Summit, and it was a great success! This was thanks to those who attended and actively engaged in the conversations regarding the importance of cyber hygiene and ways to improve operational security. We appreciate the participation from local agencies and were particularly honored to have the DHS CISA’s Assistant Director for the Integrated Operations Division, Bridget Bean, as our keynote speaker. I also want to thank and recognize Mission Critical Partners for their sponsorship; and, Aventiv Technologies, AWS, Mark43, Microsoft, and IBM for speaking at the event. We look forward to continuing the critical conversations through our Cybersecurity Task Force and through future iterations of the cybersecurity summits. Our next event is one of two annual IJIS conferences representing the 2023 IJIS Community Forum, scheduled for June 13-15 in Austin, Texas. This conference will focus on the critical issues facing our communities nationwide, from school safety to mental health and justice reform, and we will convene government executives and industry experts to learn what more the IJIS community can do to enhance public safety, improve justice outcomes, and better support the well-being of our communities. Please check out our latest draft agenda for more insights on our fantastic lineup of guest speakers throughout the event.
Earlier this year, IJIS also conducted several webinars on various topics of interest. Most notably, Information Security Officer Chris Weatherly from FBI CJIS addressed the most recent updates to the CJIS Security Policy that affect so many throughout the justice community. Given the growing importance of XML capabilities nationwide, IJIS also hosted a training session on XML basics with additional sessions available on intermediate and schema-related topics. You can access these recordings on our YouTube page and IJIS website.
Committees
Our committees, task forces, and working groups “hit the ground running” in 2023. Our newest group, the CJIS Security Policy Working Group, is in the process of developing numerous publications to assist agencies and solution developers with better understanding CJIS Security Policy and the most recent changes. Our Background Check Working Group, Cybersecurity Task Force and Corrections Advisory Committee all have critical publications on the horizon for Q2 distribution and we will inform you all once those have been released. Stay tuned!
For those members not already participating on our committees, I strongly encourage you to schedule some time with IJIS staff members and learn more about the invaluable opportunities for engagement afforded through these specific channels. If you or any of your colleagues are interested, please email IJIS Communications Specialist Alex McAdoo (Alex.McAdoo@ijis.org) for more information.
IJIS Initiatives
While the IJIS team works actively on numerous national initiatives, I am pleased to report that we have kicked off Phase II of our partnership with the California Department of Justice. Specifically, our team is gearing up to provide technical assistance to the Los Angeles Police Department, Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and San Francisco Police Department, as well as continuing our assistance for over 115 local law enforcement agencies throughout the state. If you’re interested in learning more about the Institute’s past and current initiatives,please click here.
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On behalf of the Board of Directors and our staff, I want to thank you for your ongoing support of the IJIS Institute and our mission. If you have any questions or feedback for me or the IJIS team, please let me know. We’re always striving to meet the needs of our members to best support the communities we collectively serve.
We look forward to seeing you next quarter in Austin!
Sincerely,
Maria M. Cardiellos
IJIS Executive Director