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

“Officers respond to calls uninformed of safety precautions,” says Elk River, MN Police Chief Jeffrey Beahen bluntly. “They’re on the scene without knowing if the suspect has any violent history, if they own any guns – nothing.” Once back at the station, he says, the real work began – only it wasn’t exactly police work.
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“We have a fiduciary responsibility to get value from tax dollars,” says Captain Blakely of the Riverside, California Police Department. For the past decade, Riverside has increasingly turned to information management technology, emerging as a model of public efficiency, especially these days.

As Roz Vinson, Police Records and Information Manager puts it, “I’m short 10 bodies - that’s where we are right now. Where can I work smarter? If we only have to touch something once, that’s progress.” Full story »

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

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

Behind this success has been the foresight and follow-through of Laserfiche Luminary Dr. Robert J. Sobie, the county’s Information Systems Director. For almost 15 years, Sobie has patiently championed the efficiency of the paperless workplace, department by department, process by process, all the way to the Prosecuting Attorney’s office and beyond.
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Two years ago, the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office in Florida was another local government agency with overflowing file cabinets and the inspiration (and budget) to do something about it. Laserfiche was at first intended to manage departmental records, but was soon adapted to catalogue domestic violence cases and help create SORT, the county’s public database of sexual predators. “Being able to scan in domestic violence case reports is important because these cases are very time-sensitive as far as victims support services go,” says Commander Doug Waller. “Time is definitely not on our side.”

The importance of time is especially crucial to homicide cases. “We only see about 10-12 homicides a year and we generally stay on top of them,” says Lieutenant Bruce Barnett. “But the longer a case stays open, the more the paperwork piles up.”
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“Police departments in general create a lot of paperwork and kill a lot of trees,” says Jeffrey Beahen, Chief of Police for Elk River, MN.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Police work can sure look glamorous when TV and movie stars chase bad guys on the streets of San Francisco. But for veteran SFPD Lieutenant Jack Ballentine, the reality was a massive paper chase with stacks and stacks of police reports waiting to be indexed, photocopied and distributed. Police reports by the thousands were clogging the wheels of justice and creating delays in readying criminal cases for court. Full story »

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

They never knew it could help them fight crime. Full story »

Running a jail is plenty tough without the paperwork problems.

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

With more than 6 million pages of records and 225,000 audio files, the City of Riverside’s document management solution arms police with a vast reserve of case knowledge. It also simplifies the work of records staff and helps the entire department get more from every budget dollar.

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. Full story »

As part of the City of Wichita’s enterprise Laserfiche document management solution, their Web-based accident report system establishes a new source of revenue, saves significant staff time and demonstrates the value of integrated systems to both the City and its citizens.

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. Full story »