Police work involves much more than chasing the bad guys. Routine citizen requests for reports must be honored. Statistics must be kept. Case files must remain orderly and accessible.

In the past, officers at Burlingame and Albany Police Departments in Northern California needed to take time out of their day to ensure that the paper was in order. In most cases, officers didn’t have time, and the department’s files became hard to locate and disorganized.

“Officers had to pull and re-pull files from physical folders, just to find an address or some other little piece of information,” said Burlingame Officer Ronda Caine. “Since the files had so many stopping spots within the department, just finding it on someone’s desk was troublesome, especially when it was needed at night or on weekends, when many offices are closed and locked. Not to mention, there was always a chaotic search for a single piece of paper when a citizen urgently needed information.”

When Albany and Burlingame decided to get the paper off the floor and turn to digital document management, they had to choose software that was effective yet easy to integrate into each department’s daily affairs.

With a single application, Burlingame and Albany now had the tools to scan all of their paper files into a scalable document repository—as well as the ability to organize, manage and access important police reports and files like never before.

Laserfiche can be integrated with Computer-Aided Dispatch/Records Management Systems (CAD/RMS), making it a very attractive option for the modern, tech-savvy police department.

“By giving documents common names on both the Laserfiche server and the CAD/RMS server, officers can look up cases by names, dates of occurrence, or location of occurrence,” Officer Caine said. “Using WebLink, officers just point and click to access all of a case’s documents, which are available over the department’s intranet. They do not need to access two different systems.”

At Albany P.D., the evidence department e-mails new property forms to district attorneys the morning of the trial. Albany Officer Robin Navarre uses Laserfiche to compile important Uniform Crime Report data.

“It makes my job a lot easier,” Officer Navarre said. “Before I had to walk down to the evidence room and pull case file after case file, when all I needed was a number or a case type. The UCR statistics are important because lawmakers and business owners use them to determine an area’s crime patterns.”

Laserfiche also allows non-paper material to be filed alongside the images, within the same folder: electronic documents, photographs, witness data, fingerprints, and audio files of police calls, among others.

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Tags: integration, law enforcement, Local Government, police, State and Local Government

Posted on Monday, January 12th, 2004 at 11:31 am under Customer Stories, Law Enforcement. You can comment on this post.