When San Luis Obispo County inked a deal to install Laserfiche document management software, all it had in mind was making life a little easier for couriers running paperwork back and forth to the District Attorney’s office.

They never knew it could help them fight crime.

But then, discovery has played as big a role as document management in an installation that has gradually grown to include every law enforcement agency in the county.

Four years ago SLO County won a $350,000 state grant to install document imaging software that would let its law enforcement agencies share some of their paperwork with the DA’s office electronically.

The idea was there would be no more carrying criminal rap sheets, coroner’s reports and such from all corners of the county to the DA’s office in the City of San Luis Obispo near the coast.

But, as investigators with the DA’s office have worked with Laserfiche, they’ve learned there’s a lot more to this software than saving on transportation costs.

“The importance of Laserfiche to our investigators is in using old reports and investigation records preserved by Laserfiche,” said Stephen Brown, the chief deputy district attorney for SLO County. “With Laserfiche we can reconstruct a person’s criminal history, their patterns of behavior, their associates and their present whereabouts.”

Laserfiche also makes it easier to observe and enforce the state’s three-strikes law, Brown said. And, of course, it saves lots of time and money. Many documents are now delivered to the DA’s office by Internet, not interstate.

“It certainly saves a lot of time that was spent driving the reports down here,” said Brown. “Or if a person is in custody, and they have to be arraigned within two days of the arrest, it can help those officers involved with transmitting the data to us more promptly.”

As the arguments for using Laserfiche started to pile up, other law enforcement agencies in SLO County began lining up. Arroyo Grande Police Department, the first to install it, served as the lead agency, followed by the Sheriff’s Office.

Presently, Laserfiche serves dozens of staff and officers in the Sheriff’s Office, Probation Court, Superior Court and the police departments from Arroyo Grande, Atascadero, Grover Beach, Morro Bay, Paso Robles and Pismo Beach. All send arrest and investigation reports to Brown’s office.

Of the 16,000 cases the DA’s office processes annually, about 15 percent are now transferred electronically via Laserfiche, Brown said. That number is expected to go much higher as those police departments are just now discovering new ways to manage old records using Laserfiche.

When the Paso Robles Police Department was building a new station, Laserfiche was a huge help in the transfer and storage of a mountain of paperwork into the new digs, according to Melissa Garcia, Records Clerk for the PRPD.

Various offices in the department also took advantage of the move to back up files on CDs. Department security anxieties over computerizing so many documents quickly dissolved after discovering built-in Laserfiche security access features configured to keep prying eyes out.

Garcia said recent Laserfiche upgrades have made the system work even more smoothly. Thanks to Laserfiche’s Quick Fields capture module, documents can now be stored at the push of a button without typing in filing information first.

“Now it’s pretty much a pass over the scanner and we’re done,” Garcia said. “Laserfiche saves us tons of time and man-hours with just the few minutes it takes to scan these documents. We’re not going home any earlier, we’re just doing more work in a day.”

And like Brown’s office, Paso Robles is now discovering there’s more to Laserfiche than records management.

In the past, officers looking for prior arrest records and such on detainees depended on RMS, a nationwide records management system for police arrest records. But as Paso Robles rebuilds its records room, it’s discovering that Laserfiche offers its officers a lot more than RMS.

“RMS doesn’t have photos, witness statements or hand-written notes,” Garcia said. “The documents we scan into Laserfiche do.”

Dan Matich, supervisor for the adult division of the SLO Probation Office, said his department was one of the last to install the system. Right now they use the document storage device to solve records storage space issues. Matich estimates 3,000 to 4,000 cases have been scanned in so far.

The next step is to be able to share those records with other county law enforcement agencies including Brown’s office. And Like Brown, Matich expects his office will find Laserfiche is more than just document storage software.

“We talked about someday going totally paperless with Laserfiche, but we haven’t gotten there yet,” Matich said. “But I know we can use Laserfiche for a lot more than just document storage.”

Tags: law enforcement, Quick Fields

Posted on Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 at 3:47 pm under County Government, Customer Stories, Government Newsletter, Law Enforcement, State and Local Government. You can comment on this article. trackback from your own site.