SBI: Local law enforcement behind gaps in gun background check system

"When someone goes to buy a gun and there's a background check, that check is only as good as the information that's in it," Cooper said.

SBI Special Agent in Charge Wyatt Pettengill said Tuesday that the convictions, some of which date to the 1980s, involved about 145,000 people – greater than the population of Wilmington.

Pettengill said the problem starts at the local level, where arrests aren't always reported to the SBI, which is responsible for uploading information to NICS.

If someone arrested is taken to the county jail and fingerprinted, he said, that creates a record in the SBI database that can be tracked through the court system. But sometimes people are merely cited and let go without ever going to the jail, so there's no record to track unless the local agency reports it to the state.

In cases dating back to when the Brady Bill was passed, those records haven't been reported as required.

"You’ve got one person patrolling the town, [so] it’s difficult for that one person to take a person an hour, hour-and-a-half away to book an individual," Pettengill said. "It’s a problem all across the nation. It’s just not specific to North Carolina or smaller jurisdictions. Cite-and-release does create this type of gap."

Now that the SBI has erased the backlog, he said the agency is focusing on ways to ensure a new backlog doesn't appear in the future.

The first steps involve determining which of the more than 500 local law enforcement agencies are the biggest culprits in not reporting all arrests to the SBI and find ways to make such reporting standard, Pettengill said.

"Let’s double back with the agencies now. Let’s look to see which ones are the big offenders, and let’s try to support them in any way that we can," he said.

Part of the solution could involve technology that would allow the lone deputy on patrol an hour from the county jail to collect a set of fingerprints from someone charged with a crime at the scene of the arrest so the record the SBI needs to track is created remotely, Pettengill said.

Rep. Jamie Boles, R-Moore, a member of the legislature's Justice and Public Safety Oversight Committee, said the ongoing debate over the state budget complicates the issue.

"I am aware of the under-reported cases that weren’t included in the NICS database and the concerns that they raise," Boles said in an email to WRAL News. "I feel this issue has been adequately addressed with the money in the state budget for eCourts, but it was vetoed by the governor."

However, the backlog was cleared in January, well before the current budget impasse.

in addition to ordering the SBI to continue closing the information gap on background checks, Cooper's directive calls on the agency to provide behavioral threat assessment training to local law enforcement agencies and outreach to business and community groups to build awareness of domestic terrorism indicators and help identify potential threats.