General Information - State Warrant Transactions (SWQ/SWR)

State Warrant (SWQ/SWR)

*** IMPORTANT CHANGE NOTICE ***

The FBI will be implementing a new version of the NCIC SWR specification, V 2.0. The FBI will commence testing in February. They will implement in their production environment in August; a date has not been set. At the time of implementation, the FBI will officially sunset the current version, 1.1. Accordingly, Nlets is working to update our SWR specification to reference the latest NCIC standard. You can download the most recent specification documentation.

Download Updated SWR Spec under "State Warrant Transactions - Downloads"

Please contact the Nlets Service Center with any questions. They will forward the question to the appropriate person at Nlets.

*** IMPORTANT CHANGE NOTICE ***

The purpose of the SWQ inquiry is to request State Warrant information on a subject.

Records may be requested using any of the following indices:

Name (NAM) and Date of Birth (DOB)
FBI Number (FBI)
Social Security Number (SOC)
Miscellaneous Number (MNU)
Operator's License Number (OLN)

Only one set may be used per inquiry. In other words, if an inquiry is made on the social security number, the user cannot include other fields in the inquiry. Sex and Race are optional fields for each query.

Trailing spaces should be eliminated in all data fields.

Multi-State Query Functionality

Nlets supports the Multi-State Query functionality for this message type. This functionality allows the query to be automatically sent to all states that participate in the message type and returns a single merged response.

In order to send a State Warrant transaction using the Multi-State Query, the query should be sent in its typical format to the destination NL. Nlets will take this query and send it to ALL states that support the SWQ message key. Nlets then collects all relevant responses to this query, merges them together while suppressing the NO HIT responses, and sends them onto the querying user as a single response. These responses will also contain summary data indicating which states this query was sent to, which states responded with hits, which responded with no hits, and which states did not respond at all.

States receiving legacy text or GJXDM formats will see the summary data and state responses in a flattened text format (wrapped in XML for GJXDM), whereas states receiving responses in NIEM will receive the summary and state responses in a standardized XML structure detailed below.

An important detail to note is that if a response is received after Nlets has forwarded on the merged Multi-State response, the late response will be sent individually to the original user. This would be most likely to occur if a participating state happened to be 'down' at the time of the query but came back up at a later time and responded.

SWQ Query Field Requirements

The standard Nlets message header and the following fields are used for SWQ queries.

XML: Legacy
Prefix: Field
Size: Data
Requirements: Translation:

<j4:Person>
   <nc:PersonName>
      <nc:PersonFullName>

NAM/ 1-30 Alpha
Characters Individual's name

<j4:Person>
   <nc:PersonBirthDate>
      <nc:Date>

DOB/ 1-10 mmddyy or
ccyymmdd Date of Birth

<j4:Person>
   <j4:PersonAugmentation>
     <nc:PersonFBIIdentification>
        <nc:IdentificationID>

FBI/ 1-15 See NCIC
Manual FBI number

<j4:Person>
   <j:PersonOtherIdentification>
     <nc:IdentificationID>

MNU/ 15 Alphanumeric Miscellaneous number

<j4:Person>
   <nc:PersonSSNIdentification>
      <nc:IdentificationID>

SOC/ 9 See NCIC
Manual Social Security number

<j4:Person>
   <j4:PersonAugmentation
      <nc:DriverLicense>
         <nc:DriverLicenseIdentification>
            <nc:IdentificationID>

OLN/ 20 Alphanumeric Operator's License number

<j4:Person>
   <nc:PersonSexCode>

SEX/ 1 F, M or U Prefix to identify sex

<j4:Person>
   <nc:PersonRaceCode>

RAC/ 1 See NCIC
Manual Prefix to identify race

Note: Even though the Name (NAM) field is not required for FBI Number (FBI), Social Security Number (SOC),
Miscellaneous Number (MNU) and Operators License Number (OLN), Some states do require the use of the
Name (NAM) field in order to process the transaction.

Query Help

To obtain explanatory or supplementary information on a state's warrant files, a user may send an Administrative Message to xxSWQHELP (where xx = 2-character state code).
A user may obtain a list of states participating in state warrant transactions by sending an Administrative Message to "NLSWQHELP".