It takes a village to raise a child, and it takes teamwork to change a city. For Westminster, a city of nearly 100,000 people located in Southern California’s Orange County, the need to change was highlighted when a new Assistant City Clerk—Pat Jacquez-Nares—came onboard.
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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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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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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.
Police work involves much more than chasing the bad guys. Routine citizen requests for reports must be honored. Statistics must be kept. Case files must remain orderly and accessible.
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.
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