To Protect and Save
Innovative funding brought Laserfiche to the Riverside Police Department. Innovative uses keep it paying back with better, less costly police services.
July 31st, 2009 by Hobey Echlin
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“We have a fiduciary responsibility to get value from tax dollars,” says Captain Blakely of the Riverside, California Police Department. For the past decade, Riverside has increasingly turned to information management technology, emerging as a model of public efficiency, especially these days.
As Roz Vinson, Police Records and Information Manager puts it, “I’m short 10 bodies – that’s where we are right now. Where can I work smarter? If we only have to touch something once, that’s progress.”
Tunnel: Vision.
Laserfiche helped Riverside PD escape "The Tunnel"
Before, however, “progress” just meant that you didn’t have to use a flashlight to find an old police report. The main Records Bureau housed 20 file cabinets while older reports were sent to what Vinson calls the “tunnel.” Boxes were literally stored in a locked tunnel where Records Specialists – flashlight in hand – searched for reports. “It became a running joke that people would leave a trail of bread crumbs for co-workers to find them if they didn’t return within a few hours.”
Complicating the storage and retrieval challenges were the security and retention requirements for the constant influx of paperwork:
• More than 100,000 pages accumulate each year due to high volume and long retention.
• Every day, nearly 300 new reports are filed.
• Homicide records are never destroyed. Other felonies have a 10-year retention; California’s three-strikes law mandates permanent retention for related records.
• Compliance with transparency demands of Freedom of Information Act, the California Public Records Act and court orders; Bureau staff must verify each requestor’s right to know before releasing sensitive documents.
Captain Blakely faced his own challenge. “We simply couldn’t afford to have officers off the streets long enough to pull together all of the details they might need,” he says. The push for electronic document management started in the mid-1990s with senior police officials who were very pro-technology.
In 1996, Riverside successfully appealed to the Federal Office of Community Oriented Policing Services’ Making Officer Redeployment Effective (COPS MORE) program for funding. (If it sounds familiar, it is: last March the U.S. Department of Justice announced $1 billion of the Obama administration’s ARRA’s funds would be available for new COPS funding as well). Blakely put a do-more-with-less twist on it: officers would spend more time on the streets and less time waiting for records.
But before deploying the new system, Vinson worked for directly with Laserfiche developers to analyze key business processes.
Vinson insisted on two things before going live: an integration with Riverside’s CAD system to initiate creating reports in Laserfiche, and an auto-populater program that would automate scanning in supplemental reports. Vinson explains: “The CAD call’s the first source of information – the who, what, why and where. The dispatcher is the only one that ever has to enter that information.” The integrated solution creates an archival TIFF image of the CAD history, auto-populates index information from the CAD system and places it in the Laserfiche folder. That folder then becomes the primary holder of case information, including supplemental reports, toxicology reports, photo sheets, CLETS teletypes and more. “Imagine a homicide report with 60 documents, and every single one requiring someone to type in the same information,” she says. “That integration alone has literally saved me millions of keystrokes.”
Records Bureau staffers were the first authorized users to begin using Laserfiche in 2000. Besides saving the aforementioned millions of keystrokes, Vinson says they regained countless hours formerly used making copies of records for the Legal Department, the District Attorney and other law enforcement agencies.
It took a year of proven use before detectives were given access in 2001. “You just can’t afford to have computer programs down if you are a detective working a case,” Vinson explains. Since then, she says, “We’ve slowly increased the number of users, making sure we did sufficient training to prevent errors.” By 2006, that number was 250. “Now we have over 500 users,” she says, adding that there are now six unique law enforcement repositories–internal affairs, permits and subpoenas, an audio repository, the master reports repository, personnel and training, and special investigations.”
Along with expanded use came he need for expanded functionality. A 2003 integration stores digital audio recordings of interactions between police and the public in Laserfiche the same way the CAD system works. She’s starting to add video files, which the department’s current upgrade to Laserfiche 8 and Workflow 8 will facilitate, allowing workflow rules to be established to route all related documents to single files. “The vision is to have everything in one place,” she says. “We’re going to be able to merge audios and visuals. Workflow’s going be a big part of my life.”
An Evolving Vision of Innovation in Automation
Vinson is encouraged by the watermarking capabilities of Laserfiche 8 and Web Access 8 to uphold stringent security protocols. “Having the watermark embedded in the document is huge for me,” she says. “When I export [a document] to the DA, I can track back to where it came from with Audit Trail.”
Now every Records Bureau workstation is equipped with high speed scanners. “They’re part of the way we do business,” says Vinson. “We also have front counter scanners where staff can immediately scan driver’s licenses and any other documentation needed for either filing a report, releasing a vehicle, or obtaining a legal copy of a police report.”
Staff used to have to walk back to make a black and white copy and attach the copy to their documents for scanning by other staff members. “Now,” says Vinson, “the employee doesn’t leave a citizen at the counter unattended – which is back to that desire to only handle the paper once!” Riverside citizens can report a non-emergency crimes on-line, and since launching in 2008, the system has taken in 1600 reports. “This is the bulk of the types we take in in Records,” Vinson explains. It’s even more efficient now that it’s been integrated with Laserfiche. When the supervisor approves the non-emergency report, it automatically generates a TIFF image that Import Agent inputs to the Laserfiche case file “exactly like our CAD system does,” says Vinson. “That’s paperwork we aren’t going to have scan to process. We’re not even going to touch it.” She estimates this saves her staff the time it used to take to scan 35 reports a week. “I’m always looking for ways to enhance what I’ve got now,” Vinson says. “It’s inherent in my operation.” For 2010, that will mean integrating Laserfiche with CrimeView, where, as Vinson puts it, officers will “Click on a map, click on a dot, and pull up police reports.”
Blakely says it’s this kind of automation that ultimately better informs – and protects – officers in the field. “Thanks to our document management project, the reports are available – and they do read them. Knowing the full details, including descriptions of suspects, means that they are going to be more prepared and, therefore, safer.”
More COPS MORE funding coming
August ’09 will see an additional infusion to the $1 billion of US ARRA money already allocated for COPS MORE funding, which means law enforcement agencies have never been in a better position to invest in information management technology than now. The problem, as grant writing consultant (and fellow police officer) Jim Donahue sees it, is that the small- to mid-sized agencies that could benefit most from these kind of grants are the least equipped to handle the grant-writing process. “This is not something that can be churned out in a weekend or overnight,” he says. “Agencies need to be able to devote 100 man hours to writing the grant and allocate 110% of their resources to putting it together.”
The irony is that it’s exactly the process-by-process assessment required that goes into writing a winning grant proposal that can serve as a blueprint for the kinds of innovations technology can provide. “Police departments know they need to be more efficient, but operationally they don’t know what they need to achieve,” he says. “Successful implementation of technology has to start at the bottom and go up. It’s literally asking people how they want their jobs to change.”
A good start, Donahue says, is breaking down the grant-writing criteria into five parts:
- Here’s what I’m supposed to be doing.
- Here’s where I’m falling short.
- Here’s how I can fix it.
- Here’s what it’s going to cost.
- Here’s how we’re going to measure how effective it is.
The secret to successful grant-writing he says, is the ability to produce numbers by which to measure quantifiable results. “You have to give the people who review grants something to work with.” That, he says, means breaking down costs and man-hours into before and after scenarios to illustrate exactly how the agency will benefit from the grant money. Most fail to do this, he says. “I reviewed one agency’s application that didn’t have one number in the whole thing.”
The good news, he says, is that with so many substandard COPS MORE grant applications, a well-done one has that much better of a chance to win funding – provided agencies can devote the resources to write one. “I have a friend who’s a sheriff in a small department. Every day he has to ask himself, ‘What did I miss?’ Because if it comes down to making 10 arrests and shutting down two meth labs or spending eight hours writing a grant, he has to do what he has to do,” says Donahue. “My advice is always: get help. Even if it’s at your local business college, there’s help.”
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Hobey Echlin is a Writer/Researcher in the Laserfiche Marketing department and is active in the Laserfiche Luminaries program.
Tags: advanced audit trail, COPS MORE, funding, grant writing, integration, law enforcement, records management