Utah Department of Public Safety

Response to an Inaccurate Report by KUTV’s Get Gephardt

On Monday, December 5 KUTV’s Get Gephardt aired a story about how protective orders and gun purchases are handled by the Department of Public Safety’s Bureau of Criminal Identification and the Utah Courts system. The story reporting that “names of Utahns with gun restrictions [are] not being shared with FBI database” is factually inaccurate.

GEPHARDT: “Get Gephardt investigation found that Utah is one of only three states that has not been reporting the names of people who have been slapped with a gun restriction to NCIC.”

FALSE: That is factually inaccurate.  As required by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) National Crime Information Center (NCIC), Utah has been submitting and completing the PCO/07 condition which is required by NCIC.  “PCO/07: The subject is prohibited from possessing and/or purchasing a firearm or other weapons as identified in the miscellaneous field.”

However, the Brady Record Indicator (BRD) flag has not been included on protective order submissions to NCIC because it is not a NCIC requirement and is essentially a duplication of information provided by the PCO/07 condition.

GEPHARDT: “Consider this: without a person’s name in the federal database, a person who is denied a gun in Utah could just cross a border to a neighboring state.”

CLARIFICATION: This was taken out of context, but is essentially true. If a protective order does not meet NCIC entry criteria, a purchase could potentially be made in another state, but several safeguards have been placed to restrict this.

GEPHARDT: “Tyler said he’d be eager to share more gun-restriction information with NCIC, but can’t, because that information isn’t properly making it from the Utah state court system to him.”

TRUE: This is accurate. See more below.

In July 2016, BCI received a request from KUTV for information related to protective orders. The original inquiry from producers asked why these orders were not being submitted.

BCI began internal research to answer the inquiry and found that as of July 2016, Utah had a total number of 9,547 active protective orders in NCIC. Between July 11 and July 30, BCI successfully submitted 2,450 new protective orders into NCIC. Of those, 240 included the PCO/07 condition.

The process for entry of a protective order is as follows:

o   Courts enter protective order information into their database

• DPS only houses the data and does not add or modify protective orders

o   DPS queries the court’s database and grabs anything new that was entered, modified, or deleted on an ongoing basis.

o   DPS sends an automated hourly batch upload to NCIC of all new or modified protective orders that meet the entry criteria

• Protective orders submitted to NCIC might be rejected if NCIC finds it does not meet the requirements