When Jonathan Stafford took over as Administrator of LBPD’s Records Division in 2004, he inherited a legacy imaging system built with Kofax and ApplicationXtender. “Even back in 2004, I knew the system was outdated,” says Stafford, whose area of responsibility grew to include LBPD’s Technology Division in 2008. “We were in desperate need of a flexible, easy-to-use content management solution that would grant our officers and employees access to mission-critical information from wherever they happened to be.”

Ed Ivora, Assistant Administrator of LBPD’s Records and Technology Division, notes that the old system “took too much time to manage, administer and troubleshoot. We wanted an easily customizable ECM solution that we could use without advanced engineering degrees.”

In the past, the LBPD had made use of an optical jukebox for digital document storage. “We’d take files off the server and burn them to optical disks,” explains Ivora. “The jukebox was a big piece of hardware that stored 256 disks, but like anything mechanical, it was prone to breaking down.”

Stafford notes that it wasn’t just the unreliability of the jukebox that concerned him, it was also the expense and limited archiving capabilities. “We had a half-a-million dollar archiving solution that didn’t give us a way to dispose of records that had outlived their retention schedules. From an efficiency standpoint, it just didn’t make sense.”

In August 2009, the City of Long Beach chose Laserfiche as its enterprise content management (ECM) standard, which was something Stafford had been pushing for quite some time. “We were delighted when the City decided to standardize on Laserfiche, because it was our first choice for the PD. We knew that the simplicity and flexibility of the system would enable us to be more efficient.”

Curtis Tani, Director of Technology Services for the City of Long Beach, adds, “We selected Laserfiche to create more consistency, efficiency, and transparency, while saving the city thousands of dollars in equipment and maintenance fees.”

In the PD, the transition to Laserfiche—including the migration of three million documents and nearly ten million images from the department’s legacy system—went smoothly. “We were done with the conversion process way before I expected to be,” says Stafford.

All in all, Ivora estimates that installation, including file conversion, was 100% complete within two months.

Adaptability Is Key

Through the migration process, the LBPD was able to add 20 years’ worth of arrest records to the Laserfiche repository, along with 10 years’ worth of crime reports. “What had never been digitized in the past,” says Stafford, “were the field interview cards and case files. So the first new thing we did with Laserfiche was to bring in field interview cards.” According to Stafford, detectives had been pushing him to digitize the FI cards for quite some time, since instant access to them enables them to more easily solve crimes.

When capturing files, the LBPD uses Laserfiche Import Agent, a tool that automatically brings files into Laserfiche from network directories, fax servers and local folders. “Import Agent lets us use the fax servers, MFPs and other Xerox machines we already had in place,” Ivora explains.

Just as the Records & Technology Division didn’t have to invest in new hardware, it also didn’t have to invest in creating all-new folder structures. “Everyone was happy with the way general information—like maps, procedural documents, assault weapon information and so on—was structured and organized in our legacy system,” says Ivora. “Laserfiche is flexible and adaptable enough that we could mirror the old structure in a Laserfiche folder called PD Docs, allowing people to access and view this information in a familiar format.”

He adds, “Laserfiche is great because it’s easy to customize it to our needs.”

Expanding Access to the Field

To date, the LBPD’s repository contains a wide range of electronic and scanned content, including:

• Tickets.
• Restraining orders.
• Arrest reports.
• Timecards.
• Policies and procedures.
• Forms.
• And more.

With Laserfiche, LBPD officers have the ability to retrieve many of these document types directly from their patrol vehicles, whereas in the past they could only view them from computers in the police station. Laserfiche WebLink, a browser-based thin client that provides secure, read-only access to the repository, gives them immediate access to these documents when they’re in the field, saving time and ensuring that they follow the proper procedures and have the most current information on hand.

“One thing I’ve learned over thirteen years of working for the PD is that you have to make things easy for the officers,” says Stafford. “They need to worry about protecting us, not about finding the right paperwork.”

Targeting Gang Members

The PD’s gang injunction program has benefitted tremendously from remote access to the Laserfiche repository. Gang injunctions are court-issued restraining orders prohibiting gang members from participating in specific activities such as loitering, smoking marijuana or wearing gang colors. These injunctions allow officers to arrest named gang members for injunction violations rather than waiting for a more serious crime to occur.

In order to make an arrest based on a gang injunction, officers must first confirm that the gang member in question has previously been served a copy of all court documents related to the injunction. In the past, LBPD officers were forced to call around the PD to confirm proof of service. Tracking down the paperwork was frequently a time-consuming task that resulted in missed opportunities to make arrests.

Today, a tight, three-way integration between Laserfiche, Tiburon (the PD’s records management application) and Business Objects (LBPD’s business intelligence software) gives officers the ability to pull up specific Crystal Reports containing hyperlinks to images stored in the Laserfiche repository. Through Laserfiche WebLink, officers can instantly access the injunction-related information and images needed to make arrests.

“This integration allows us to deliver injunction information to officers in the field in as few clicks as possible,” says Stafford. “The impact has been huge.”

In fact, on November 8, 2010, the LBPD, along with Long Beach’s mayor and prosecutors, announced a massive gang injunction against more than 100 known gang members with ties to the Mexican Mafia. The injunction targets gang members from all over Los Angeles County who commit crimes in Long Beach—not just those based in Long Beach. Without Laserfiche, enforcing this injunction would be difficult, to say the least.

Working Up to Workflow

Although Stafford is happy with the progress LBPD has made with Laserfiche so far, he explains, “We’re going to push this system to automate business processes as well as eliminate our paper files.”

Laserfiche Workflow will be the engine driving the automation of business processes, and the uniform ordering process will be the first one to be transformed.

Currently, officers fill out a paper form when they need new boots or a new shirt. The form must be approved by the officer’s sergeant and then his commander before it moves on to Personnel. After Personnel checks the officer’s order history, the form moves to the Fiscal Department, which forwards it to the uniform service. After that, Fiscal must call the officer and inform him that he may place his order directly with the uniform service.

According to Stafford, “It’s a frustrating, repetitive process that would be much simpler with e-forms and automatic e-mail routing.”

Once the uniform ordering process has been automated, Stafford’s team will tackle police report request process, which will enable employees to more efficiently manage citizens’ and insurance companies’ requests for police reports.

Business-Led Technology

With 1,450 employees in the LBPD, all of whom have access to Laserfiche, Stafford notes that the system’s ability to balance central control with local flexibility is vital.

“We create different repositories for different divisions because they all have their own unique document types and preferred filing methods,” explains Stafford. “Laserfiche gives us central control over system administration and security, while giving each of the divisions control over its own information.”

He continues, “When we were evaluating ECM technology, we knew we wanted a system that would adapt to the needs of our business, not the other way around. Laserfiche is helping us solve crimes and save lives, and it’s doing it in the way we want, not the way a vendor prescribes.”

As he outlines the overall benefits of Laserfiche, including simplicity, user-friendliness and adaptability, Stafford points out that the PD is only one year into a five-year implementation. “We’re getting there,” he says, “but this is just the beginning.”

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.

“Officers would have to go through multiple locations and cabinets to find anything, which could take up to three days if it was over a weekend,” Beahen says. If officers could find what they needed, he adds, they would often have to return to the office from the field, get the documents and then return to the field—or take someone into custody who could have been cited in the field and released. Either way, that was valuable police time officers in the city of 24,000 at the edge of suburban Minneapolis could more effectively spend patrolling the streets.

Beahen saw the impact of paper on his department was not just organizational, but procedural. “Lost paperwork could impede prosecution,” he says. “Sometimes we’d be unable to coordinate multiple pieces of information and evidence to solve crimes.”

Chief Beahen

The cost—well that was a whole other story. “Man hours used to manage documents and case files was the biggest drain on the department,” Beahen says. By his estimates, the ERPD spent over $17,000 a year and needed 3.5 full-time employees just to process and store the paperwork generated by the department’s 24,000 cases each year. “Files might have three or 3,000 pages. But then we had to sort them all, and everyone would to have them – defense attorneys, prosecutors, courts, the state, FBI and other government and county agencies. So they’d all have to be copied, mailed and delivered. That killed a lot of trees.”

Besides case files, there were the gun permits, alarm files and other forms the police department was required to maintain. “We were going through 36 reams of paper a year, which, if you add up all the different copies we’d have to make for everybody, wound up at 251 reams of paper, which was 2.2 tons of paper or 54 adult trees,” Beahen says. He estimates the paper alone cost well over a $1,000 a year, not to mention the storage costs of four shelves required to house all this paper.

Beahen saw that going paperless would transform the way his officers dealt with information, both organizationally and procedurally. Since arriving in Elk River as Assistant Chief in 1998, Beahen had been a proponent of technology, working after hours to install computers and build a network “just to get everyone on e-mail.”

In 2002, Elk River purchased Laserfiche, and soon the city’s reseller, Cities Digital, Inc., expanded Laserfiche to the Police Department. However, the Police Department’s records management system (RMS) worked on a proprietary SQL-based server. “While Laserfiche had an open architecture, there was just no way to bring the RMS together with it. Everybody’s desktop had two icons, so you’d pull up the case number and go into Laserfiche to find supporting documents. There was a lot of jumping back and forth, and no access in the squad cars,” Beahen says. “We wanted to get to the point where everything for a case file could be scanned in and filed by case number and the whole thing could be sent out as an attachment, or accessed from a laptop in a squad car.

“We just wanted to make it simple,” he adds.

In 2007, it became just that simple. Beahen was approached by the Law Enforcement Technology Group (LETG) with a Web-based police records management system. “It wasn’t proprietary, so anything we could scan into and store in Laserfiche we could attach right to the record from the RMS. It turned the process of accessing records and documentation into a one-stop shop.”

Interoperability with Laserfiche was key when Beahen worked with LETG to set up the RMS, which Beahen describes as “friendly with Laserfiche,” in a way that media attachments from Laserfiche and police records are simultaneously accessed from a combined repository. “What we were really impressed by is how easy it was to integrate Laserfiche into our Web-based RMS. This kind of interoperability was really important to us because it was simply a matter of knowing how things are stored in one system and how it’s stored in the other and being able to build that bridge between them in a matter of days,” he says. “This is the kind of thing that you hear stories about seven engineers working on and two months and $85,000 later, it still isn’t working right. Our integration was done in less than a week.”

An Elk River PD officer accessing Laserfiche from his squad car

These days, Beahen says, “Everything that we scanned goes into our browser-based RMS system. Officers have a wireless card in their squad car so the computer automatically updates to the central repository. Photos, maps, reports, names – everything is accessible from our squad cars.”

With only the fuzziest of details to search the database, officers responding to a scene can instantly access a criminal’s history and an incident’s full details. “This keeps officers safe all the time, because we have specific and related information available to police in the field instantly,” Beahen says.

Besides resolving the organizational issues associated with the old paper-based filing system, Beahen says the department has seen significant procedural improvements as well. For starters, all content is scanned into Laserfiche using Quick Fields advanced capture. “The time required to fill out paper forms used to be enormous, now it’s just, boom, drop it in the scanner, predetermined templates and voilà!”

Tickets and case paperwork are filed immediately in Laserfiche, which prevents the risk of evidence tampering. “We can cross-reference with other resources prior to disturbing crime scenes,” he says. “That means greater coordination and access to evidence, so we’re solving crimes faster.”

There is also the freedom and necessity of being able to collaborate with other police departments and cities, state agencies, courts, FBI, the Department of Human Services and other county authorities. Beahen cites an example of how effective this information sharing can be. “A missing person’s body washed up about 50 miles down the Mississippi River from us. Because of Laserfiche we were able to quickly provide identifying information to local authorities, identify the victim, and within hours, we were able to notify the family.”

As the Elk River Police Department’s use of Laserfiche shows, you don’t have to be the biggest department to realize real and valuable benefits from using Laserfiche; you just have to have some vision. In fact, the ERPD’s use of technology was recognized with a 2008 award for Excellence in Information Technology from the International Association of Chiefs of Police– alongside some of the biggest, most advanced police agencies in the world.

Beahen is encouraged by the fact that a lot of skepticism about digital information has been put to rest by the U.S. Supreme Court. “Hesitance on electronic records and processing is not really a big deal anymore, but some people realize this sooner than others,” he says.

And his advice for other law enforcement agencies facing the challenges he was? “Have patience, a plan and a budget. Get past your fear of courts not liking electronic documents, put the old ways in the file cabinet you’ll be getting rid of, and make the quantum leap.”

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.”

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.

It’s this kind of progressive approach to information and process management that’s transformed the Hamilton Police Service from a command-and-control police model to a community-based-and-problem-solving service over the last decade. As HPS Records Supervisor Gary Holden puts it, “Laserfiche has allowed us to spend more time in the community and less time travelling back and forth to the station.”

But this progressive approach had to begin somewhere, and it started in 2000 when IT Manager Ross Memmlo began investigating document management to alleviate storage costs and repurpose valuable office space. Franz Gangl of Laserfiche reseller IKON Office Solutions demonstrated Laserfiche’s information management capabilities for Memmolo, IT Administrator Diana Scime, Shari Moore and Holden.

Holden says they chose Laserfiche based on four criteria:

• Business Functionality: “It needed to be really user-friendly, no matter how comfortable staff were with computers. Our reseller showed us an example of an agency about our size using a system similar in size and capacity to our proposal.”
• System Architecture: “The flexibility and expandability to allow for future development and integration was important.”
• Organization/Support Training: “We knew whenever we had a question, all we had to do was make that call to the 1-800 number.”
• Project Schedule: “According to our funding cycler, the system needed to be up and running by year’s end.”

Working with IKON, Memmlo planned a phased implementation that would begin with current reports, advance to backlog conversion, and finally establish Web access for officers and staff. Phase I began in fall 2002, scanning current incident reports and Motor Vehicle Collision (MVC) reports.

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In early 2002, the implementation team developed “banner pages” to enable Quick Fields to index various reports, which helped with a massive backlog conversion project that would eventually add 860,000 images to the system. “We were able to scan anything and everything – photographs, willsays, handwritten notes – into folders,” says Holden. By 2004, the Laserfiche repository held over 300,000 active and historical incident reports, DNA records, MVC reports, pardon files and sudden death reports.

“One challenge we faced was reworking our existing paper processes,” explains Holden. “Many of our serious offences needed to be disseminated to many different officers and divisions. The new process had to ensure the report was coded according to Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics, then scanned, entered on the Canadian Police Information Center (CPIC) system and reassigned for further investigation. The process changed how our Records Business Centre handled the reports.” To remedy the situation, Holden created a color-coded folder system staff use to process reports prior to scanning.

Quick Fields’ automated indexing also helped Holden to standardize the record keeping process, which, along with Laserfiche’s fuzzy search capabilities, has almost completely eradicated misfiling. “If a report is improperly indexed, we simply run a search to locate it within the database,” explains Holden.

This search capability has become especially empowering to police officers. “Optical Character Recognition (OCR) allows the front-line officer to glean valuable information from reports that wasn’t possible in the past,” Holden says.

“If an officer wants to know more about a rash of Breaking & Enterings where all he knows is a red pick-up that has a unique decal on the side door was involved, he can use Laserfiche search to look up other reports,” he adds. “We can’t possibly index every piece of information within a police report, but OCR and fuzzy search addresses that problem, making it a valuable investigative tool.”

It has become even more valuable since Hamilton deployed Laserfiche WebLink in 2004. Police Chief Brian Mullan, responding to a need for heightened police presence, realized he didn’t necessarily need to hire more officers if officers spent less time looking for paperwork. Holden explains. “With Internet access to the Laserfiche repository, officers can view police reports on their MDT [mobile data terminal],” he says. “It’s effectively made our cruisers an extension of our Records Management System (RMS). They can search five historical reports right away without linking.”

Adds Holden, “The ability to view active missing person photos or photographs of lost or stolen property is critical when locating a missing youth on the street or locating previously stolen property.”

For 2009-2010, the HPS Laserfiche team plans to expand Laserfiche to Hamilton’s Human Resources and Legal departments, but not before answering concerns about employee confidentiality and security rights.

For support, Holden looked to the Laserfiche Police User Groups he’s been attending for three years. “I knew York Police Service used Laserfiche in its HR department, so I thought, ‘Why re-invent the wheel?’ I asked them about their implementation and training process and what worked.” Based on what he learned, Holden formulated his own strategy, highlighting the ability to assign multi-layer security to employee records in transit, the ability for assigned HR staff to view documents from their desktop, as well as reducing paper files and better controlling retention.

The three patrol divisions in the City of Hamilton.

“We have three separate divisions. Laserfiche will allow yearly performance reviews to be shipped electronically between offices,” he explains. “It’s easy to understand Laserfiche as a simple storage repository, but you can move things around so you’re actually managing active records. The security capabilities of Laserfiche were a huge benefit for me to ensure confidentiality during this process, because I could assign rights that allowed a user to browse a report but not open it. They’d be directed to see the proper authority to obtain a copy of the report where necessary, which facilitated our disclosure processes.”

The ability to redact sensitive information was also key to the Records Business Center’s ability to process disclosures to the Courts and outside agencies. “The redaction ability of Laserfiche is by far, one the greatest assets to address these needs,” Holden says. “We used to copy our reports—twice—then black out the information and then copy the vetted version again. Redacting in Laserfiche saved us a fortune in paper and time. We also use stamping and sticky note annotations to address disclosure/non-disclosure issues and verification/validation processes of ongoing police investigations.”

It wasn’t until Holden could show that Laserfiche Audit Trail would ensure the integrity of legal documents that the Crown [District] Attorney signed on. “I had meetings with the Crown Attorney to ensure them there were no legal issues producing these documents as evidence in court,” Holden remembers. “We discussed the quality of the images and how we’d be using Audit Trail to confirm when a document was scanned or modified. We were ultimately able to scan in every document—except for witness statements, which they requested to remain in their original paper form.”

Ultimately, the Hamilton Police Service has realized a significant amount of savings by using Laserfiche to refine its business processes:

• $200,000 saved annually, due to downsizing 4 civilian staff in the Records Business Centre, as officers are able to access vital information directly.
• Officers spend more time in the community because they no longer need to attend Central Station to view reports.
• Clerks save time, because they no longer need to locate reports and read them to officers over the phone.
• Valuable floor space has been reclaimed from paper storage.
• Redacting documents in Laserfiche saves “a fortune in paper and time,” as Holden puts it, helping staff more easily meet file requests from the Courts and outside agencies.

• Spring 2002: The Project Team chooses Laserfiche.
• Fall 2002: Phase I begins. Staff start scanning in current incident reports and Motor Vehicle Collision (MVC) reports.
• 2003: Indexing is automated with Quick Fields. Backlog conversion of historical occurrence reports (860,000 images) takes 30 weeks.
• 2004: Phase I is successfully finished, with over 300,000 records and reports scanned into the system. Phase II begins. When it is finished, every officer and designated civilian will have direct access to Laserfiche through the Internet.
• 2009: Web access expands Laserfiche access to 120 additional users, including officers in their patrol cars.
• 2010: The Police Laserfiche Team plans to expand use to Human Resources and Legal Services departments.

It’s all part of a new MO for police work in Elk River. No more gathering evidence at the scene and then poring over case files back at headquarters. Now the case files come to the scene, all the files, all the time.

Decades of police work are now instantly available to Elk River sector car laptops, thanks to a compilation of computer software and hardware that helped earn the small town PD a coveted Innovation in Information Technology award at the 2008 International Association of Chiefs of Police in November. The heartbeat of this new system is a growing database containing police incident and accident reports, photos, investigation notes, confessions. It contains all the information Elk River officers have compiled in the process of doing their jobs over the years.

This Elk River, MN, officer uses his squad car like a rolling office and his laptop as a library. It links directly to a Laserfiche electronic database containing the entire case file at police headquarters. The system helped earn Elk River a coveted Innovation in Information Technology award at the 2008 International Association of Chiefs of Police in November.

All the data are available over the Internet, through a password-secure link that’s easy as Google and works faster than Detective Columbo … a lot faster. Just type in a name, address, license plate or other investigation specifics, and every match found in the database at headquarters pops up on the sector car laptop.

Whether it’s a traffic violation or felonious assault, officers on the scene are instantly wired into headquarters, and they don’t need anyone pulling case files for them.

“When you think of instantly delivering to every officer’s car every piece of information that’s in our criminal files, that’s huge,” Elk River Police Chief Jeffrey Beahen said. “We’re talking real-time investigative tools at the officer’s fingertips.”

With the new system, writing up traffic violations starts with swiping the driver’s license into a barcode reader in the officer’s car. An electronic form pops up on the sector car computer with the license information already in place. Violation specifics are filled in by the officer, and a ticket is printed out and handed to the driver in a fraction of the time of conventional hand-written tickets, Beahen said.

At the same time, an electronic record of the violation heads over the headquarters via the wireless link, set up by the Minnesota-based Law Enforcement Technology Group, which designed the system. Once clerks back at headquarters verify the information, a permanent record is stored into the department’s database using software designed by Long Beach, CA, document management specialists Laserfiche. An electronic copy of the documents is also sent to the state’s court system for prosecution, saving staff clerical time on that end, too.

If the incident is something more involved, like a domestic dispute, officers heading out to the scene can call up any previous cases invovling the address, victim’s names or any other pertinent information from the department’s new database. The information requested – including photos – is available to the sector car computers via the same Internet connection, allowing officers to read up before they get to the scene.

It’s that database that officers instantly accessed on their way to the playground and on their way to the scene scene where the robbery suspect’s clothes were found. The database provided officers with everything the department had in its case files to help prepare them for the field work ahead.

Such databases are being employed by police departments across the country.

They reach far beyond the old CAD and RMS systems because they allow investigators to look into hundreds of thousands of case files at once, simply by using key phrases, names, addresses or other pertinent information. Such databases are allowing cutting-edge criminal investigation and prosecution across the country, specifically because they can search so much information so quickly.

In San Luis Obispo, CA, Laserfiche is helping law enforcement instantly search out case file details that took hours to look up manually. It helped Wichita, KS, investigators find the “BTK” serial killer, and the Brevard County, FL, sheriff’s office hopes a similar database it just installed will help solve cold cases, including a 14-year-old murder of a local girl.

“Law enforcement is just a natural application of this technology,” said Brian LaPointe, Laserfiche’s law enforcement technical advisor. “These databases allow officers to do in minutes what used to take hours. Having trained law enforcement professional spending their time rummaging through filing cabinets these days when they could be out protecting the public? That’s a crime.”

Officials with the aforementioned law enforcement agencies all agreed. However, they also said that installing these databases and making the transition to paperless operations like Elk River takes patience, commitment and cash. These systems are not just plugged in: a decade’s worth of police paperwork has to be scanned into a computer, and staffers have to be trained to use it.

But the long-term benefits far outweigh the short-term investments, Beahen and others said. The hardest part of installing the Laserfiche system in Elk River, Beahen said, was pulling the paperclips and staples from the existing files before scanning them in.

“The time spent getting the new system in place goes quick[ly],” he said. “The only downside is getting all those old documents ready for scanning. My staffers were getting their fingers cut on all the staples.”

The upside is that Elk River has saved the equivalent of 2.5 full-time staff costs in hours not being spent chasing down, copying and faxing paperwork, Beahen said.

Instead, clerical staff, who used to spend half the week typing in the weekend’s case files, are now caught up by 11 on Monday morning.

The new system has also translated into less paper taking up filing cabinet space around Elk River headquarters. In an average year, Elk River officers open 22,000 new case files with up to 2,000 pages each. Those kinds of numbers fill up filing cabinets fast, but with LETG’s new system in place, all that information is now fed directly into the Laserfiche database through the sector car computers.

The department saved $17,000 on reduced paper costs along the way. Where officer and staff filed away about a half-million pages of incident, accident and investigation reports in past years, in 2008, Beahen said they filed just about two dozen pages.

For any department balking at the time, work and money involved in such a transition – the Elk River system cost about $100,000 – Chief Beahen had this to say: “What do you want your staff to spend the majority of their time doing? I want my officers, detectives and sworn staff spending time on mission based activities, not heading to the filing cabinet or mailbox looking for paperwork. Way too much of our time was spent waiting, and looking, for paperwork. Now that time is spent on police work.”

This article was initially published in the Jan/Feb 2009 issue of Public Safety IT.

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.

“Laserfiche came into the county in 1995 as a single-user application to support my IT department,” Sobie recalls. Other departments were hesitant to see the value of scanning, but by 1997 Sobie was able to implement document imaging in the Construction Code Department to establish a digital archive of scanned building permits. By 2000, Sobie found what he needed: an internal Laserfiche champion in Prosecuting Attorney Jeffrey Sauter.

Sauter had a history of advocating increased communications between his office and the courts, and Sobie saw where Laserfiche could do just that. Sobie had already stepped up his own use of Laserfiche by having his administrative assistant scan all incoming mail for him to view online. The viability of this approach to working with documents led to a conversation with Sauter about going digital. “I saw it as more than a way to archive closed case files,” Sobie says. “I thought we could use it for active case files and sharing documents both inter- and intra-agency.”

Establishing a Laserfiche Expert

Sauter was interested – so much so that he wanted to get several scanners, presumably for several employees. But where Sauter had a use for Laserfiche, Sobie had a vision: “I advocated against multiple scanners on the grounds that we could develop an ‘expert’ within his office who would fully learn and understand how Laserfiche could benefit the office, today, and into the future.” Additionally, Sobie recognized that over time, less paper would be produced or submitted to Sauter’s office, thus reducing the need for scanning equipment. Sobie diplomatically met with concerned staffers to assure them this would be the most effective – and sustainable – route to go. “Eventually, Jeff agreed and we implemented a single scanner and began developing the expertise of an administrative staff member, Kimberly Gleason, who presently works in the PA’s office.”

In subsequent meetings with Sauter’s staff, the idea came up to view documents live in the courtrooms, which brought with it a need for wireless network access and laptops.

Sobie extended Laserfiche in the PA’s Office and brought it on-line with five laptops with wireless connections for about $24,000 – but has gotten quite an ROI in return.

“The $24,000 we spent to bring the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office on-line represents the costs to expand the system into the office. Earlier costs were not spread between any offices – just assigned to my IT department. However, the ROI with or without spreading these other costs has been significant,” Sobie says.

• Nine lateral filing cabinets of paper were reduced to one, which holds archived evidence on CDs.
• Office supply costs were cut by 34% - an annual savings of over $35,000.
• The office eliminated a part-time legal assistant position, saving $10,000 annually.
• The office also eliminated a budget request for an additional legal secretary, a savings of $50,000 annually.

The total savings? Over $95,000 annually in staffing and supply costs.

Archiving cases was one thing; relying on laptops for both preparation and court appearances was another. “Jeff experienced some resistance but he methodically promoted this new approach. On occasion, Sobie recalls, Sauter used the phrase, “There will be no old dogs here,” meaning, “Change your attitude and practices or move on.”

“Not everyone learns the same or at the same pace,” Sobie says. “This continues to be a challenge, but it’s unrelated to the easy-to-use Laserfiche interface.”

Working with the Lansing-based Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan (PAAM), Sobie helped Sauter create a system to link cases with PAAM’s online case-tracking systems. Attorney’s progress notes would be saved in the case-tracking system; legal assistants would scan and save any new documents in Laserfiche while linked to the case-tracking record and easily accessed through a keystroke.

After years of success, the more complicated a case becomes, the more Laserfiche makes sense to find, review and distribute documents. One of the early problems encountered after building out the wireless network was a weak connection causing attorneys to temporarily disconnect from the network while working in the court’s law library. The cause, ironically enough: the density of the paper-based books and documents stored in the room.

Sauter has seen many benefits since transforming how case files are established and maintained in his office. One noteworthy benefit is that discovery is now sent so swiftly, using Laserfiche and e-mail, defense attorneys often receive it before they get the actual notice of appointment from the court. In fact, Sauter has seen so many benefits from Laserfiche that he spends time speaking at industry conferences about paperless file management – and even hosts site visits from other prosecutors interested in eliminating their paper case files.

Next, Sobie plans to implement Laserfiche Records Management Edition, and possibly Workflow, to automate, manage and move documents through the County while establishing document retention policies. He’s also working to establish Laserfiche redundancy. “I believe mirroring the Laserfiche environment will significantly improve the process of recovering a document (or folder) that was inadvertently deleted,” he says. “Of course, the new Recycle Bin feature [of Laserfiche 8] helps to mitigate this problem but I also want maximum availability of documents stored in Laserfiche.”

Sobie loves the efficiency Laserfiche brings Eaton County, but when asked his three favorite things about Laserfiche, he doesn’t hesitate in answering.

“First, document and information sharing in a campus-style environment,” he says. “Second, the stability of the core Laserfiche application. And finally, the continuous product development.”

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.”

Nowhere was this more evident than in the murder case of Charlotte “Amy” Gellert. One Sunday evening in March, 1994, the 21-year-old returned to her parents’ home, only to walk into a botched robbery attempt. The thief, who had tied up her parents, stabbed Gellert to death and fled the scene.

Over the past decade and a half, the case had gone cold, leaving a mountain of paperwork behind. Most homicides accumulate a box or two of paperwork, but the Gellert case had eight owing to its myriad suspects, reports, statements, testimony and evidence, all stored in what officers referred to as “the big room.”

Barnett saw the potential of using Laserfiche for compiling and indexing the Gellert case along with the county’s other 46 cold case homicides. Some dated as far back as 1967. Almost all had long since seen their initial team of investigators transfer, retire or move on, which complicated the already-difficult task of locating information in decades-old paperwork. “In the past we’d had issues with misplaced files,” Barnett says.

Beginning late last year, the Sheriff’s office began a painstaking backlog conversion project beginning with the Gellert case. Staff often worked after hours to scan and organize files into Laserfiche folders.

In the process, they’d possibly uncover a piece of the puzzle that could hopefully bring a resolution to crimes that have haunted victims’ families for decades. Barnett had realistic hopes for the new technology, pointing out that police departments are not as high-tech as Hollywood makes them out to be. “I remember in 1990 when we had Tandy TS80 words processors and what a big improvement that was over typewriters!”

“It’s frustrating when you’re in front of jurors who think we should be able to have a case solved in an hour because they’re so used to seeing Hollywood depict it that way. It’s not something we can do from our desktop yet,” Barnett adds.

No, but they can at least look at the case from their desktop now, which, Waller explains, is a huge improvement. Putting cold case files into Laserfiche, he says, is a powerful first step in revisiting an investigation. “It’s always good to get a new set of eyes on a case,” he says. “We’re talking about scraps of paper, sometimes stuffed in files, that used to take hours, sometimes days to dig out – that is if you could find it. Now I can see it from my desk in moments.”

It’s not quite “CSI: Laserfiche” but it’s getting there. Unlike television shows where detectives huddle around supercomputers that can reveal a fingerprint, photo and —this gets a chuckle from Waller—a reliable current address, all with a single keystroke, local law enforcement send data comparison requests to state and national databases. These can take hours, sometimes weeks or even months, to come back with possible matches. “I wish we could solve the whole thing in an hour like TV does,” Waller says. “We don’t have the budgets Hollywood thinks we have.

“Local governments are always the first to have budgets cut,” he adds. “The reality is, we just don’t have the resources to address cold homicide cases every day.”

But when officers are able to turn their attention to a cold case—and just having to dig into old files to scan them creates awareness—Laserfiche provides them with a wider lens to view what’s there. “We can start comparing data from other cases, like behaviors, things left behind at the crime scene or modes of entry,” says Barnett.

Waller is even more emphatic: “Fifteen or twenty years later there may be something that glows in the dark that wasn’t so obvious at the time of the crime.”

And in the Gellert case, he says, something has: while re-evaluating evidence during the case file upload process, a DNA sample was discovered. “We obtained the DNA profile after reviewing the case and resubmitting the evidence for analysis that did not exist at the time of the crime,“ Waller says. “It’s the kind of thing we weren’t scientifically capable of doing fifteen years ago.”

That’s no guarantee the case will be solved. Barnett has transferred to another division within the county, and just a few weeks ago, the Los Angeles Times reported that some 400 DNA samples in rape and homicide cases were languishing unanalyzed due to the limited resources to analyze them.

But Laserfiche is a step in the right direction, especially for police departments with limited resources.

“Police departments usually have records managers because of the sheer amount of paperwork they generate,” notes Donny Barstow of Laserfiche reseller MCCi. “They’re already using [police software], but that’s just for their active data, not their records.” Because so many local governments already use Laserfiche, expanding its use to law enforcement and specifically cold cases is a way to maximize both resources and service, he says.

Other police departments using Laserfiche have already solved high-profile cold cases. In Wichita, KS, the so-called BTK killer was brought to justice after years of eluding police because authorities were able to track the metadata on a computer disc he used to communicate with a newspaper.

And in Hollywood, FL, the case of Adam Walsh, whose disappearance and murder inspired his grieving father John Walsh to found the “America’s Most Wanted” franchise, was finally closed last December, again partly because police were able to conclusively link a suspect who died in custody in 1996 once and for all to the disappearance and murder. The Walsh case shows just how important it is to catalogue and access information in a case: in a tragic investigative misstep, a blood soaked piece of a car seat, and eventually the entire car itself, were accidentally destroyed due to a documentation mix-up.

Waller points out that being able to use Laserfiche to compare data from other cases, to get that fresh set of eyes, as he calls it, is not unlike Operation SMART, a state-wide law enforcement cold case effort that Brevard County participates in to collaborate and compare experience and expertise in investigations that span cities and regions.

With Laserfiche’s case, it’s spanning time. “I can’t say that we’ve solved a case yet,” Waller admits, “but we have several that are very close.”

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.

When Beahen came to Elk River as assistant chief in 1998, the department was still using typewriters and carbon paper. “There were these two PC’s with a word processing program for transcription purposes,” he remembers. “We used a main frame computer that operated in DOS for our existing records system, which was purchased in 1984.”

Beahen immediately began upgrading the department’s technology, working after hours to install computers and build a network to get everyone on e-mail. Next up was finding an information storage system to use on the new network. “Everybody knew we needed it. It was more like who wanted to be the first one to get it out there,” he says. Beahen got it out there, and sixteen months later, Elk River was using Laserfiche.

Beahen immediately saw Laserfiche’s potential. “We wanted to get to the point where everything for a case file could be scanned in and filed by case number and the whole thing could be sent out as an attachment,” he says. “We just wanted to make it that simple.”

But before that could happen, two things had to be contended with: old paper files and an outdated database.

“We open between 24,000 and 25,000 files a year—and that takes up a whole storage room,” Beahen explains. “A file for something like a DUI might have 30 or 40 documents, and things get lost. Arson and burglary files, when you consider all the statements and photos, can easily be eight or nine hundred pages. If you’re working a homicide case, you might be adding reports every day.”

For officers who had to testify at court, that meant printing out and distributing seven or more copies of the file to judges, attorneys and detectives, which resulted in both a lot of paper and a lot of transportation costs.

“The county attorney’s eight miles away, the city attorney’s 12 miles away, nobody’s right there in the same building,” Beahen says. “Now, we’re slowly but surely scanning previous years’ case records. When we first started, we had to find case records. Now, once we’ve get them, we scan them. The whole transaction takes less than half a day,” Beahen says proudly. “We’ve been completely paperless since April of 2007.”

Then there was the challenge of maximizing Laserfiche’s potential by replacing Elk River’s outmoded database.

“Our old system was proprietary, so we could only use Laserfiche for storage,” Beahen says. “One of our goals was to find a new records system that would allow us to accept data from the Laserfiche-scanned documents that could be attached directly to the record as media.”

Being able to scan and attach is actually what attracted him to Laserfiche in the first place.

“That’s one of the big reasons why we selected it. With Laserfiche, you just scan all the odds and ends in the same file. We used to have to create all these PDFs and then attach them. Now, Laserfiche interacts directly with our existing records system and scans everything—4×8s, half-sheets, full-sheets—into the same case number,” he says.

But not everyone made the paperless switch as enthusiastically.

“Sometimes the judges and courts just need that paper in front of them, because they’re used to that. But we’ve met with them and they’re now convinced that this is the future. They’ve directed everyone in their offices to work toward a paperless system for everything,” Beahen says. “The tickets we write are already being sent in electronically. Now they’re looking at e-filing complaints and all court orders.

“What wins them over is I can be on the phone with them and tell them ‘I’m going to send it electronically.’ And then, while I’m on the phone, I’ll say ‘Open your e-mail and hit print.’ The speed and efficiency wins over all the doubters.”

What’s won Beahen over is the sheer range of benefits from using a paperless system.

“Last year we saved over $17,000 just in paper costs,” he begins. “Plus, it’s green. There are more energy and resources savings than people might think. Out of my yearly budget that doesn’t seem that significant, but with budget cuts and the actual man hours you’re saving, it adds up.”

Then there’s the technical edge his officers enjoy.

“We’re talking real-time investigative tools at the officer’s fingertips,” Beahen offers. “We’re not a very high-crime area, but we do see our share of property crimes. Like breaking into construction sites and stealing copper. Now we can have an officer on the scene who’s found a guy with cutting tools in his trunk. And we may have a case a month earlier where we have a picture of the shoes used in that crime. The officer can immediately view the picture of the shoes and see if it matches,” Beahen explains. “In the old days, someone had to drive all the way back and look up the file—that is, if they had access to it.

“When you think of giving every officer every piece of information in the car instantly, that’s huge. If we have it, they have it.”

Elk River’s high-tech transition has been almost total: in addition to using Quick Fields and Web Link, the ERPD uses Crimereports.com to provide a link to its service calls and interfaces using an electronic roll-call page.

Still, some old habits die hard. “We were so used to having to put staples through everything,” Beahen jokes. “The biggest headache of using our Laserfiche system is taking everything we had stapled together apart so we could scan it in.”

Not that his successors will have to do that. They might not even need to know what a stapler is.

“We have a new generation of officers that can text with one hand while they talk on the cell and still use the radio,” he observes. “We were moving some old equipment this younger guy saw one of the old typewriters from when I first got here in 1998, and he was asking, ‘What’s this?’”

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.

WebLink plays a key role in our integration between Laserfiche and our CAD-RMS. Once staff locates the relevant case file in the RMS, WebLink lets them easily view scanned documents, photographs and other items associated with that file. We like the fact that WebLink is highly flexible and platform independent, which made the integration process easier. And our staff definitely appreciates the fact that they can access documents instantly, without having to trek to the records room.

Along with apprehending people who’ve committed crimes, police officers have a duty to prevent crime from happening. We saw an excellent opportunity to use Laserfiche as part of this effort too. We installed a third-party crime analytics tool called CrimeView Web®, which uses GIS technology and the information in our RMS to generate maps of the city showing where burglaries, assaults, auto thefts and other crimes occur. To access more detailed information about these crimes, staff can pull up documents stored in Laserfiche by simply selecting a visual marker on the map or clicking a case number. This instant access to information helps officers identify patterns, which in turn helps them to better use available resources—such as regular police patrols at certain times of the day—to cut the crime rate. It also means that they’re better prepared, and therefore safer, when they hit the streets.

We’re very happy with what we’ve been able to accomplish using Laserfiche. I attend the yearly Laserfiche Institute Conference, where I talk with IT staff from other municipalities who are considering the types of integrations we’ve done in Claremont. I’ve also worked with other municipalities to help them set up their Laserfiche systems. I’d be happy to contribute some of our code to the Code Library, which I see as another way of helping IT staff at different organizations learn from each other and share the work they’ve done.

To see Laserfiche document management in action, attend our free law enforcement webinar on Wednesday, July 2. However, attendance is limited, so reserve your spot today. We’ll discuss real issues and show real solutions that fit police departments of all sizes, in all locations.

For prosecuting attorneys, cases revolve around overstuffed paper file folders, and the Eaton County prosecutor’s office was spending a large amount of time shuffling paper. “We spent up to 50 percent of our time in the office working with the case file folder—and we weren’t using the time, we were wasting it,” says Jeffrey L. Sauter, the county’s prosecuting attorney.

The process of digitizing paper files began in October 2003, when Dr. Robert Sobie, Eaton County’s information services director, suggested that Sauter’s office digitally archive closed files and scan active files. Sauter had one simple question: “Do you think you can eliminate all this paper?”

A resounding “yes” came in the form of a Laserfiche® digital document management solution. With a simple integration, case files scanned and stored in Laserfiche link to the Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan’s Adult Case Tracking System (ACTS) and Juvenile Case Tracking System (JCTS), the case management systems (CMS) used by 78 of the 83 prosecutors in Michigan. While that system was great for managing schedules, attorneys still relied on paper progress notes and case documents. Now, from within the CMS, attorneys or staff simply click a button to create case notes that are automatically filed in Laserfiche for easy retrieval.

Reducing paper consumption was a big plus, but the biggest efficiency gains happened when the prosecutor’s office began scanning in current files. In January 2004, they began transitioning between paper and electronic files, and a year later, the office stopped creating paper misdemeanor files entirely.

“We went slowly,” Sauter remembers, “but once we realized the sky hadn’t fallen, we stopped making paper felony files. These are more serious cases, and eliminating paper files entirely made some of our attorneys nervous. But within a month, we noticed how much more efficient we were.”

Eaton County structured their Laserfiche filing system around the criminal transaction number, which the CMS automatically generates. “We have ‘frequent fliers,’ habitual criminals with multiple case files, so it was no use to search by name,” Sauter says. Once the CMS creates the case file, the assigned attorney then reviews it, highlighting the authorization or denial of the charges in Laserfiche. Laserfiche’s sticky note annotation feature enables attorneys to provide detailed analysis and charging instructions directly on the documents.

The police department and defense attorneys have started submitting police reports, pre-trial motions and other documents electronically, eliminating scanning and shredding. “90 percent of our police reports are sent electronically, with photos and videos sent on disk,” Sauter says. “We use Snapshot™ to send them to our repository. Defense attorneys submit their documents to our department e-mail address, and we e-mail documents to them as well. The defense attorneys like it so much—because the court sends documents via US mail, they often have our discovery documents days before they even know they’ve been assigned the case.”

After implementing Laserfiche, the prosecutor’s office withdrew their request for an additional legal secretary, only one month after beginning to scan felony files. In addition, they saved more than $10,000 in clerical staffing costs and decreased office supply usage by nearly 35 percent. “These additional savings are annual, not one-time savings,” Sauter comments. “In fact, I expect my supplies budget to decrease even more next year.”

While their Laserfiche system worked well, Sauter wanted to extend its benefits outside the prosecutor’s office. “The interface was great,” he said, “but our attorneys needed files in court. I talked to Dr. Sobie, and we switched our attorneys from desktop computers to laptops, and we also extended a county wireless network into courtrooms and conference rooms.”

With wireless access from the courtroom, attorneys who are in court can also e-mail their colleagues back in the office with questions pertaining to case law. “We get a lot of S.O.S. e-mails from the courtroom, of the ‘Help, the judge is about to rule against me’ type,” Sauter comments.

Eaton County uses Laserfiche to store audio of all 911 calls, so attorneys can access them instantly from within the CMS. Having evidence at the ready makes pretrial conferences faster and easier, because prosecutors can present their evidence, convincing defense attorneys and defendants of the wisdom of a plea bargain. “Honestly, it provides many quick resolutions to cases that likely would have gone to trial instead—which is a huge advantage for taxpayers,” Sauter says.

Laserfiche also makes managing electronic evidence and complying with e-discovery orders much easier. “We can instantly search documents to find information in witness statements, which makes it easier to impeach those witnesses on the stand,” Sauter says. “The text is right there, and with the ‘hit list’ showing bolded lines of context, it’s quick to find information, which we can save to use during the trial.”

And that’s not to mention the benefit of having photographs and other evidence at the ready when the witness is on the stand. Sauter recalls using Laserfiche for the first time during a double murder trial. “Because it was the first big case without the paper file, I wanted to take it to set an example for the other prosecutors in the office,” he remembers.

With diagrams and crime scene photos stored in Laserfiche, Sauter explained the sequence of events to the jury. “This proved very effective,” he says. “I used the Laserfiche digital zoom feature to focus on specific areas of the crime scene photos. The jury found that very impressive.”

In the future, Eaton County plans to use Laserfiche Workflow 8™ to further automate case workflow. The new system will automatically notify attorneys of cases by e-mail, as well as automatically notify police when charges are filed.

Sauter and his team are so committed to educating prosecutors about the benefit of a paperless office that their Website provides an extensive review of their file management system, as well as training videos prepared by office staff. Sauter also speaks at industry conferences about Eaton County’s successes with Laserfiche.

“Paperless file management is not an ‘if,’ it’s a ‘when,’” Sauter says. “Our change has led to a revolutionary improvement in how we do the people’s business, and it’s a harbinger of the future for many other prosecutors’ offices.”

The Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, which connects St. Tammany Parish to New Orleans, is the longest bridge in the world.

Prior to installing Laserfiche®, staff in the office’s criminal records department spent most of their time managing paper. The department’s supervisor, Captain Margie Hennessey, remembers the floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets staff would have to search through when detectives requested a file. To save storage space, records older than five years were transferred to microfilm; finding information in those files required staff to locate the correct film cartridge, load it into a microfilm reader and scroll until they reached the page they were looking for.

“Although the indexing system we used was fairly efficient, searches could take us anywhere from a couple of minutes to an hour or more,” Hennessey recalls. “Occasionally, we’d start looking for a document and discover that it had been misfiled. At that point, chaos would often result, as everyone got involved in the search.”

The office’s IT staff began researching document management systems with the goal of eliminating these manual search processes and reclaiming physical storage space. After evaluating several systems, the office selected Laserfiche because of its ease of use and because of the local technical support they’d receive from their Laserfiche reseller, ImageTek of Louisiana. Staff were also impressed by the system’s security features. “It’s critical that we protect the information in our case files—most of which can’t be released without a court order,” Hennessey explains. “Scanning documents into Laserfiche makes them much more secure than the paper copies we used to store in filing cabinets.”

“During Hurricane Katrina, we experienced some very traumatic times. At one point, the records division was down to three staff members—and we usually have a staff of nine. If it wasn’t for Laserfiche, we wouldn’t have been able to keep up with our caseload.”

Captain Margie Hennessey
St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office

Now, when detectives create a case file, secretarial staff scan the documents into the Laserfiche repository, where they’re stored in electronic folders whose structure replicates the physical filing system the office used in the past. As part of the scanning process, Laserfiche’s OCR functionality indexes each document’s content, making it immediately available for full-text searching.

Although Hennessey and her staff do a lot of scanning themselves, they also perform quality control on documents scanned by the secretaries. “We make sure that each document is legible, is indexed correctly and can be retrieved by our detectives,” she says. The detectives particularly appreciate the Laserfiche Plus™ module, which enables staff to quickly burn documents to CD. Because each CD includes a built-in document viewer, detectives can use the same search tools on these documents that they use on their desktop computers to search the full Laserfiche repository. “Thanks to the CDs, our detectives can review case documents on their laptops from wherever they need to be—and even work on cases from home,” Hennessey says.

Despite the time and efficiency savings Laserfiche has brought to the sheriff’s office, detectives continue to create a paper file for each of their cases. “The district attorney likes to have physical copies of documents on hand, for use during discovery,” Hennessey says. “So, after we scan the case file into Laserfiche, we deliver the original documents to the district attorney’s office, and they store the paperwork in their records room.”

Even though staff in the district attorney’s office continue to work with paper documents, Hennessey explains that they, too, have benefited from Laserfiche. “We provided the district attorney’s office with view-only Laserfiche licenses. Whenever we send them original documents, we drop the scanned images into their Laserfiche folder,” she says. “Thanks to Laserfiche, staff in that office can now view documents right on their computer screens, and they can use the system’s search tools to quickly find the information they need, without having to look through the paper file.”

In addition to the criminal records department, other divisions within the sheriff’s office use Laserfiche to streamline processes and eliminate paperwork. For example, the human resources department uses Laserfiche to manage personnel files and job applications. The jail uses Laserfiche to manage booking sheets and inmate health reports. And the occupational licensing division uses Laserfiche to manage documentation on each of the 8,600 vendors registered to do business in the parish.

Along with its flexibility, one of the major strengths of the Laserfiche system lies in the way it helps government agencies continue operations when a disaster occurs—something that was put to the test when Hurricane Katrina struck St. Tammany Parish in 2005. Hennessey says that, as the hurricane approached, she and her colleagues were confident that the office’s criminal records were secure. “Our IS division regularly backs up all our servers. Once the hurricane passed, they brought the servers back online, and we went back to work,” she says.

Once the storm passed, however, the parish had to deal with the aftermath. “We experienced some very traumatic times; there was devastation and loss of life all around us,” Hennessey remembers. “We lost several employees due to relocation. At one point, the records division was down to three staff members—and we usually have a staff of nine. If it hadn’t been for Laserfiche, we wouldn’t have been able to keep up with our caseload.”

A good old-fashioned Louisiana crawfish boil.

That caseload has only increased in the years following the hurricane, as displaced residents from New Orleans and other neighboring areas have resettled in St. Tammany Parish. But Hennessey and her colleagues haven’t had any trouble keeping up with the demands that accompany all of this growth. “In the four years since we installed Laserfiche, the parish’s population has increased by more than one-third, and our office has put 35 more deputies and 20 more detectives on the street,” she says. “Yet we haven’t hired more staff in the records department.”

She adds that staff are both more productive and more accurate than they used to be, and that they spend far less time making photocopies and searching for documents. In fact, since the office installed Laserfiche, they’ve reduced their photocopying costs by two-thirds.

Hennessey doesn’t mince words when she’s asked whether she’d recommend Laserfiche to other law enforcement agencies. “Not only would I—I already have,” she says. “We’ve had staff from other agencies visit our office, and they’ve been impressed with what they’ve seen. Generally, they’re most concerned with budgetary questions, and I tell them that Laserfiche will pay for itself in a short period of time.

“Laserfiche has definitely helped us better serve the parish’s citizens,” she continues. “Laserfiche makes us more efficient, meaning we can organize case files and get them to the district attorney’s office more quickly, which helps the parish keep criminals off the street. Prosecuting the people who commit crimes is the bottom line—there’s nothing we do that’s more important than that.”

Lieutenant Jack Ballentine

“We greatly appreciate the outstanding service and swift way Laserfiche® and TCi have handled our operational concerns.”

—Lieutenant Jack Ballentine,
San Francisco Police

Ballentine’s staff was dwindling due to retirements, and it was clearly time for the 150-year-old law enforcement agency to get smarter with technology. He spearheaded an initiative to bring in document management software from Laserfiche® and system integrators Technical Consultants International (TCi).

Ballentine says, “We greatly appreciate the outstanding service and swift way Laserfiche and TCi have handled our operational concerns.” That review comes after Laserfiche has only been on the job for a few weeks and only in the records room at headquarters. The SFPD is starting off slowly as it attempts to groom decades of data in electronic and paper forms into something more manageable. There’s lots of room for improvement for their record-keeping. It’s almost as paper-based now as it was 30 years ago. Each day, the SFPD’s 2,300 officers add 1,500 new pages of reports, which quickly accumulate into a massive paper problem. Every month the records room alone goes through a pallet of paper – that’s 200,000 sheets.”

So far, Laserfiche is used as an electronic data bank. In the past eight years, the department has indexed and imaged nine million pages of police reports. Untold millions more pages of paper reports are in filing cabinets throughout the department.

An incident report is the initial item in what can be a very long chain of documents – supplemental reports, evidence, statements and more. Most of it starts out as paper but needs to be digitized right away so it can be distributed to officers, attorneys and judges.

In San Francisco, most police reports are written on PCs installed in the 10 district police stations around the city. Sounds good so far, but then they’re printed out and hand-delivered to the records room, where they are photocopied and distributed on paper to the investigations bureau and the district attorney.

One set of paper reports is scanned and automatically indexed into Laserfiche. With a previous system, all the indexing was done manually by typing in a few pieces of information from the report, with lots of errors and wasted resources; so Laserfiche is already streamlining the process.

Another set of paper goes to clerical staff that key a bit more of the information into the 70’s era mainframe system, which is shared with the court and district attorney. A new records management system being adopted by the department is still many months away. Until that system gets going, the most comprehensive information is found in the images and searchable text in Laserfiche.

The next step will be giving access to reports in Laserfiche over the secure public safety intranet, so inspectors and district attorneys can locate the reports without leaving their desks. But the big leap will occur once the reports that officers create on the police station computers can be automatically picked up, imaged and indexed into Laserfiche without human intervention. It’s an easy technical fix but a difficult bureaucratic challenge to get it done.

TCi Director of Professional Services Bill Bigley says there is still more Laserfiche can do to streamline police work in the City by the Bay.

“San Francisco has many agencies that need to tap into this system,” Bigley said, “including the district attorney’s office, the courts and the police department’s own legal division. Eventually all SF Criminal Justice Agencies could be given secure access to these records through the Web.”

Lofty notions when you’re talking about big-city bureaucracies that have to sign off and then collaborate on such projects. But smaller departments and agencies across the country are doing exactly that.

• In San Luis Obispo County, CA, Laserfiche serves several hundred staff and officers with 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 records to the county district attorney via Laserfiche. “It certainly saves a lot of time that was spent driving the reports down here,” said Stephen Brown, the Chief Deputy District Attorney for SLO County.”
• The Kern County, CA, Sheriff’s Office is getting wired to the county courts system via a password-protected, internet-accessible Laserfiche system that has cut delivery time for court-issued restraining orders from days to minutes. “They can have it literally in minutes,” said Marc St. Laurent, who is supervising document imaging for the Kern County Superior Court. “It helps to protect the public and it helps protect potential victims from harm.”
• In Cowlitz County, WA, the courts have seen a drastic reduction in the amount of paper work created there and they’ve used Laserfiche to streamline the workday of everyone from the sheriff’s office to judges to defense attorneys. Judges now have Laserfiche directly at the bench, meaning they can access complete files from the clerk’s office with the click of a button. Soon, lawyers will be able to access clients’ court files without leaving the office, courtesy of the Web-available Laserfiche software. “I can’t imagine what it would have been like if we hadn’t done this – we would have had a real nightmare,” said Cowlitz County District Court Administrator Dee Wirkkala. “We were supposed to start out with a limited scope and it’s working so well we keep adding more and more and more to it.”

These are the sorts of services and testimonials San Francisco Law Enforcement Agencies could be receiving as well, according to Bigley. “The key thing,” he said, “is that Laserfiche enables more accurate information and makes that information available to more agencies.”

Ballentine is all too aware of the possibilities, but sometimes revolutions come in baby steps. Regardless of how bright the future is, he’s happy for now to enjoy this new version of the present.

Said TCi’s Bill Bigley, “Seven or eight months ago there were 25,000 reports sitting on a table because of inefficient processes – a huge backlog that affected their staff, the public and the courts. Laserfiche has been a dramatic help in reducing that, and it’s going to keep them from getting backlogged in the future.”

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.”

Yet there it was, the stairwell paper shuffle, an extra daily challenge for the staff of Washington state’s Cowlitz County Jail.

It worked something like this. Twenty five inmates squeezed into the jail’s video hearing room on the third floor, the District Court judge receiving their closed circuit televised testimony on the second floor and corrections officer running up and down between the two, collecting the signatures to make it all official.

“Inmates in various states of sobriety and cooperation would wait an hour sometimes two as the paperwork came and went. It was fun”, says Corrections Officer Dave Fundingsland, “ to sit and watch the bad vibes fester as the wheels of justice worked their way through the stairwells.”

“The inmates tend to get restless,” said the 15-year jail veteran, noting that there are sometimes volatile combinations of people in that hearing room. “I remember one time we had a husband and wife in there at the same time for domestic violence assault.”

That was before they started using Laserfiche. The new software, installed because a cumbersome system was about to approach impossible with the jail’s relocation across the street, allows defendants to simply sign an electronic pad in the video hearing room. No more stairs.

Everything from release forms, to sentences, to no-contact orders are now dealt with in real time, with all the pertinent info and background available to everyone on both ends.

“Now,” said Fundingsland, “they’re in that room for maybe 15, 20 minutes.”

On the other side of the street, District Court administrator Dee Wirkkala says simply, “I can’t imagine what it would have been like if we hadn’t done this – we would have had a real nightmare.”

Dee Wakkala

“In fact,” she says,” the success has led to one downside of Laserfiche’s installation: “We’re never finished.”

“We were supposed to start out with a limited scope,” Wirkkala said, “and it’s working so well we keep adding more and more and more to it.”

Indeed, thanks to cooperative creative work of Cowlitz IT ace Patty Kero and Laserfiche vendor VP Consulting, the software has brought into sight a once unthinkable goal: An almost entirely paper-free courthouse.

“You could feel that something extra good was going to happen from the start,” said VP VAR Vicki Pattle, a Laserfiche reseller since 1993. “In the end, the programmer, Patty Kero, broke new ground in using Laserfiche.”

Along with the jail system installation, Kero wrote a program for the small claims court that Wirkkala insists is responsible for “a huge efficiency upgrade” since its arrival in March.

When someone comes in with a new small claims case — lawyer-free lawsuits of less than $4,000 from the five surrounding towns covered by Cowlitz County District Court – it’s paperless from the start.

“When the original file comes in, we use Laserfiche – we don’t build a file, we don’t save paper,” said Wirkkala, noting the obvious advantage over traditional filing.

“We had (an old paper file) this morning that got misfiled and we probably spent three hours trying to find this physical file, where if it had been (in Laserfiche) we wouldn’t have had to look for it.”

With cases that come in now, any of the court’s 16 staffers can instantly access the entire file without having to worry about who has it or where it needs to be. That includes the judge, who links to Laserfiche through a monitor right on the bench.

But as important as the software itself, according to Kero, has been its ability to adapt to the specific needs of its users. They were able move along cautiously in the jail and courthouse, she said, making minor adjustments as any issues arose.

“We did take it slow,” said Kero, explaining that “the software really evolved with them.”

Fundingsland, who operates the system at the jail, calls it “pretty much flawless.”

When we first started we had to make changes here and there,” he said. “We called (Kero) and it was done.”

The success has bred more plans. Soon, the judge will be able to sign an electronic pad to finalize, record and print – for parties to take with them — his decisions in one step.

And it’s hoped that by the middle of next year, defendant’s lawyers will be able to access Laserfiche via the Internet and handle their client’s in-court needs electronically.

Combine that with the notion of scanning and eliminating the tens of thousands of old files stored in cabinets, and Wirkkala says it’s whole new world. Consider that last year alone there were 26,427 cases filed, and each file averages roughly 20 pieces of paper.

“Then we do have some that are 6 inches thick,” she said.

All of it, argues Kero, will be safer when the work is done. There is password security for all files and disc back-ups stored off site.

“In a lot of ways it’s more secure than if you had a paper copy,” she said. “What if there’s a fire or a flood or an earthquake? If something happens, a document could be gone forever with no way to protect them.”

The advancement, however, leads to yet another nice-to-have problem: How to use the newly vacated space.

“There’s a whole section where we keep small claims, and now there’s nothing there,” said Wirkkala. “Every once in a while I’ll walk up there to pull a file and say, ‘Oh, wait a minute…’ Just to get rid of even half of this stuff would be amazing.”

Records Manager Roz Vinson and Captain Mike Blakely reveal how the Riverside, CA, Police Department took bold first steps and now makes great strides in quality of service to officers and the community.

More than 100,000 pages accumulate in the Records Bureau each year due to high volume and long retention. Every day, nearly 300 new reports are filed. Homicide records are never destroyed, and other felony records have a 10-year retention. The state’s three-strikes law mandates permanent retention for related records. The Records Bureau also must navigate the web of rules and regulations that governs the release of police records: the Freedom of Information Act, the California Public Records Act, court orders. Bureau staff must verify each requestor’s right to know before releasing sensitive documents.

That’s the records management side. On the street, officers and detectives need complete information to work safely and effectively. But according to Captain Blakely, in the past, “We simply couldn’t afford to have officers off the streets long enough to pull together all of the details they might need.”

The challenge facing Riverside PD was how to put more intelligence into officers’ hands without pulling them off the street to wait in line for records. All without compromising security or complicating the already difficult job of the Records Bureau.

“The push for conversion from paper-based files to electronic document management started in the mid-1990s with senior police officials who were very pro-technology,” Vinson says.

Captain Blakely adds, “We have a fiduciary responsibility to get value from tax dollars. We felt that we had an obligation to enable the officers we had to be more efficient and chose to focus our attention on automation.”

A successful proposal to the federal Office of Community Oriented Policing Services’ Making Officer Redeployment Effective (COPS MORE) program won the funding. Riverside proposed that a document management solution would free officers to spend more time on the streets and less time waiting for records.

The Laserfiche project got underway in 2000. Records Bureau staffers were the first authorized users. Only when Vinson had confirmed the effectiveness of the system to her rigorous standards did she consider providing wider access. “You just can’t afford to have computer programs down if you are a detective working a case,” she says. In 2001, the department extended access to detectives and sergeants. “We’ve slowly increased the number of users, making sure we did sufficient training to prevent the introduction of errors,” she says. “We now have 250 users.”

Detectives, sergeants and police management have access to reports in Laserfiche. The Legal Department has read-only access. This alone is a major gain in efficiency over pre-document management days, when bureau staff lost countless hours making copies for the Legal Department, the District Attorney and other law enforcement agencies.

And what improves productivity in the Records Bureau helps protect officers in the field. “Thanks to our document management project,” says Captain Blakely, “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.”

The Records Bureau is also exploring application integration to further advance its records automation strategy. Its CAD system is already integrated with Laserfiche to automatically create case folders in the document management repository.

The integrated solution creates an archival TIFF image of the CAD history, autopopulates 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.

Looking ahead, Riverside PD plans to build on today’s successes. Ms.Vinson’s vision is to have all reports, digital audio and video recordings, digital photos and supplemental information accessible in one Laserfiche case file.

Until then, she concludes, the current improvements mean that “police officers and detectives are on the streets more than before, with more information at their fingertips.”

Call it e-government, or simply call it a smart way to get things done. Here’s how Imaging Analyst Cliff Thomas and his colleagues at the City of Wichita got beyond the buzzwords and made it happen.

When the City of Wichita IT and Police Records staff met to discuss ways to streamline internal processes that would also improve public service, they agreed to begin with traffic accident reports. Thomas recalls, “We all said, ‘Why not put them online?’”

All Wichita citizens involved in an accident must submit copies of accident reports to the state Registry of Motor Vehicles and send the case numbers to their insurance companies. In turn, insurers request their own copies directly from the Wichita Police Department for use when settling claims.Prior to the launch of the online system, six to eight citizens came to the front counter of the Police Records Division each day to request copies of accident reports. They completed the request form and paid a convenience fee. Records staff told them that the report would be mailed within two weeks.

On average it took more than 20 minutes for a clerk to process each request, including searching for and photocopying each report. The division provided copies of all accident reports to insurance companies for a nominal fee. Delivering these services consumed 50 to 60 staff-hours each month.

Why not put accident reports online? That was just one good question among many. Others included how to link the payment application to the document management system, how to securely roll it out to the public and how to generate new revenue in the process.

In the initial phases of Wichita’s document management project, the City built a Laserfiche repository of more than 6.5 million searchable digital images, reclaiming hundreds of square feet of office space in the process. Currently, more than 5.5 million of those pages are imaged police records, including accident reports.

The City was already using Laserfiche WebLink to provide Web-based, thin-client document retrieval to authorized City staff. Integrating WebLink with a payment processing solution to enable online availability of accident reports seemed a natural progression toward greater electronic delivery of public services.

The remaining “big question,” says Thomas, “was whether we would be able to set up a payment system that could tell our document imaging system to release an imaged file.

“It turned out to be a relatively easy programming challenge, however, utilizing the Laserfiche Integrator’s Toolkit, especially since Laserfiche was already integrated with our public safety software program. Basically, we use the case number of the report to set everything in motion. It works beautifully.”

The new online accident report system eliminates human involvement with transactions and has reduced in-person accident report requests at the Police Records Division to a trickle. When a citizen does come to the front counter, records clerks use the online system to find and print requested reports in seconds.

By delivering an online service in which the public sees immediate value, Wichita is able to charge $16 for each report. Charges to insurance companies have increased from $2 to $16 per report. According to Thomas, because the insurers recognize the value in faster access, they don’t mind paying more for the ability to simply retrieve reports over the Web by case number.

“They love the new system,” says Thomas. “It saves them both man hours and messenger costs. On balance, they’re making out, too.”

Thomas concludes, “In my opinion, the reason we’re doing so well is because Laserfiche software allowed us to scale up. The scalability enabled us to get started, win over staff and figure out where we wanted to go. I think that is an ideal approach for any local government in which cost and staff acceptance are concerns.”

Wichita IT analyst Cliff Thomas became part of the search team when local detectives and FBI agents arrived in his office. Wichita police reports stored in Laserfiche digital records management system contains clues needed to break the case, they said. They’ve been studying Laserfiche files daily ever since.

The killer murdered seven people in between 1974 and 1979, four young women, two children and a man. He calls himself “BTK” in letters to police and news media due to his preferred murder method: “bind, torture and kill.”

“Critical police investigative records from the 70s cases are indexed in Laserfiche,”Thomas said. “The indexes have been scanned and are accessible on investigators’ computers. Laserfiche’s full-text search let polices study similarities in the cases they couldn’t do 25 years ago with thousands of individual pieces of paper.”

The BTK case is a joint investigation of the Wichita Police Department, Kansas Bureau of Investigations and Federal Bureau of Investigations. Detectives believe the killer is still in town. Wichita Police administrative aide Vonnie Forgie said Laserfiche helps new investigators become productive instantly.

“Having the BTK case indexed and searchable is a great help in a cold case,” Forgie said.

Laserfiche new officers can research specific details of the case without having to read through every file folder. The killer resurfaced after The Wichita Eagle ran a story on the 30th anniversary of the first killing.

He sent police a single sheet of copied photos of a woman mysteriously killed in 1986 and marked the piece of paper with the secret signature he used to identify himself in several 70’s letters.

Laserfiche solution provider Galaxie Business Equipment in suburban Winfield, KS is ready to index new information developed. This is likely to be a case in which technology will finally given police the leverage to bring BTK to justice.

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.