In most industries, being unable to access the right information can be costly and inefficient. But in law enforcement, it can be inconvenient—even deadly.

“Officers respond to calls uninformed of safety precautions,” says Elk River, MN Police Chief Jeffrey Beahen bluntly. “They’re on the scene without knowing if the suspect has any violent history, if they own any guns – nothing.” Once back at the station, he says, the real work began – only it wasn’t exactly police work.
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Judges are often not fond of challenging the status quo and paperwork has definitely set a precedent in America’s courthouses. But as electronic document management is moving into courthouses across the country, Laserfiche has been going Hollywood—turning trial testimony into made-for-TV high drama. Full story »

“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.” Full story »

Time was, when an officer from Ontario’s Hamilton Police Service (HPS) responded to investigate a call about an EDP (emotionally disturbed person), they’d have two choices to determine risk factors as they proceeded: Drive back to the station with the EDP to look up past reports – or place a call and wait for a Records Clerk to pull the report and read it to them over the phone. Either way, the officer would be off the street, sometimes for hours, waiting for the necessary information to act on.

These days, however, an officer responding to the same call can pull up reports right in their patrol car, accessing information vital to the safety of the EDP – and the public – using just a name, incident number or other simple keyword.
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When Elk River, MN, officers got a call of an elderly man in adult diapers at a playground, sector cars arrived moments later heavily armed with what they needed most to bring the man in safely – information. They had his picture, they knew his name and family and that he was a potentially violent Alzheimer’s patient reported missing days ago.
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The Eaton County, MI’s Prosecuting Attorney’s Office has long been recognized for its visionary use of Laserfiche. What began in 2003 as a means of archiving closed cases has evolved into a department-wide embrace of technology that has eliminated file cabinets, saved significant time and an exponential amount of money. Perhaps most sustainably, Laserfiche has improved the way attorneys work. Lawyers summon case information – police reports, photographs, even video and audio archives of 911 calls – right in the courtroom from a digital briefcase. Plus, minimal staff is required to stay ahead of the continuous inflow of paper generated.

Behind this success has been the foresight and follow-through of Laserfiche Luminary Dr. Robert J. Sobie, the county’s Information Systems Director. For almost 15 years, Sobie has patiently championed the efficiency of the paperless workplace, department by department, process by process, all the way to the Prosecuting Attorney’s office and beyond.
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Since implementing Laserfiche in 2007, Collin County, TX, home to the Dallas/Fort Worth area’s fastest-growing northeast suburbs, has enjoyed enterprise-wide success automating and integrating its business processes. But as Records Manager Margaret Anderson points out, it’s been as a direct result of equally enterprise-wide pre-planning working with the county’s myriad departments.

The County saw its population increase nearly 50%—from nearly 500,000 in 2000 to 725,000 by 2007—straining the county’s infrastructure. As Anderson puts it, “The exponential growth rate of our county is reflected in the increased demand for essential county services.” The governing body of the county, the Commissioners Court, then issued a strategic direction to improve efficiency and customer service. “This caused us to look at an enterprise solution to managing our records with emphasis on migrating to electronic records,” she explains. “We had to reduce our paper and microfilm records volume.”
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Two years ago, the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office in Florida was another local government agency with overflowing file cabinets and the inspiration (and budget) to do something about it. Laserfiche was at first intended to manage departmental records, but was soon adapted to catalogue domestic violence cases and help create SORT, the county’s public database of sexual predators. “Being able to scan in domestic violence case reports is important because these cases are very time-sensitive as far as victims support services go,” says Commander Doug Waller. “Time is definitely not on our side.”

The importance of time is especially crucial to homicide cases. “We only see about 10-12 homicides a year and we generally stay on top of them,” says Lieutenant Bruce Barnett. “But the longer a case stays open, the more the paperwork piles up.”
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As one of the fastest growing counties in the nation, Collin County, TX, faced the challenge of managing an increasingly-large number of records generated by a growing population.

According to Records Manager Margaret Anderson, staff in the county’s courts had difficulty finding information, due to disparate systems implemented by each department. “We also had over 15,000 reels of microfilm and 18,450 boxes of paper stored throughout the county,” she says. “Files were everywhere and we couldn’t keep up with the demand. We had to ensure that staff did not unintentionally destroy records that needed to be retained, and we wanted to implement a case management system (CMS). But we also had to manage all the paper.

“Our first step was to select and implement a new case management system for the county court system,” Anderson continues. “The records management system (RMS) we chose needed to interface with this system and provide records management control for closed and disposed case files, as well as support documents.”
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“Police departments in general create a lot of paperwork and kill a lot of trees,” says Jeffrey Beahen, Chief of Police for Elk River, MN.

But Beahen’s department is saving trees and racking up awards—including one for Excellence in Innovation in Information Technology from the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) just this year.

“Our peers are John Hopkins University, the San Diego Police Department, the Canadian Research Center and the Dutch National Police,” Beahen notes proudly. “And little old Elk River is up on the porch with the big dogs.”

Elk Rapids, home to 24,000 and located on the outskirts of greater Minneapolis, got up on that porch thanks to Beahen’s vision of giving his officers every technological advantage available—with Laserfiche playing a vital role in both that vision and that advantage.

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The majority of legal cases in California begin in one of the state’s 58 superior courts. With facilities in more than 450 locations, the superior courts hear both civil and criminal cases, as well as family, probate and juvenile cases. The superior courts make up the largest part of California’s judicial system—which is itself the largest in the United States. Full story »

Thinking of a traditional courthouse records room might conjure up images of file cabinets overflowing with folders, but that’s not how it works in York County, PA, where staff have used technology to streamline the thousands of cases that pass through the court system each year. Full story »

Steve Senkle, Information Systems Manager, City of Claremont, CA

As a former Claremont Police Officer, I remember what a hassle it used to be to get ahold of police records. There was always a long line of people at the counter in the records department, and it would take considerable time to pull and photocopy the original reports. More often than not, we’d then have to fax the report to someone, and because some of the reports were 100 or more pages long, that process took a lot of time.

In 1998, we started scanning our crime reports, traffic accident reports and field interview cards into Laserfiche. We chose Laserfiche primarily because of its powerful search capabilities and because of how easy it is to get documents into the repository and organize them once they’re there. We also knew we’d be able to use Laserfiche in tandem with our other software applications, including our police department’s CAD-RMS. Full story »

Criminal trials are notorious for the excessive amounts of paperwork they generate. But in Eaton County, MI, prosecuting attorneys are going to court with laptops instead of briefcases full of paper files—an advantage that has led to better communication, easier pretrial conferences and quicker case resolutions. Full story »

A lot of people associate an electronic document management system (EDMS) with the goal of realizing the “paperless office.” But as the St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, Sheriff’s Office shows, it’s possible to realize all the benefits of an EDMS—including greater staff efficiency, smarter work processes and lower overhead costs—without entirely doing away with paper copies of important documents and records. Full story »