For example, it was nearly impossible for employees to append pages to scanned documents that were stored in Alchemy; typically, in order to add pages, the whole document needed to be rescanned and resaved.

Jacquez-Nares urged the city to find a more sophisticated, user-friendly solution. It was at this point that a collaborative, inter-departmental team was formed with Jacquez-Nares as the project manager.

All of the City’s departments—City Clerk, City Manager, Community Development, Community Services, Finance, Human Resources, IT, Police and Public Works—came together to define their requirements for the RFP. The selection came down to two choices: Laserfiche and LibertyNET. In the end, the balance tipped in favor of Laserfiche for two reasons:

• Its comprehensive search functionality and easy-to-use Web interface made Laserfiche the most user-friendly choice.
• A formal needs assessment showed that implementing Laserfiche would ultimately save the city $273,200 by freeing up enough office space to create a total of 13 workstations for essential city services such as traffic management.

Westminster purchased the software from Laserfiche reseller ECS Imaging in June 2008. Because Laserfiche is easy to use and Jacquez-Nares already had a lot of experience with it, virtually no formal training was required. By August, the solution had been installed, the City had begun back scanning the Planning Department’s records and by November, all Alchemy files had been migrated into the new system.

Making City Content Accessible in Seconds

As a part of its Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) solution, Westminster deployed Laserfiche WebLink, a secure Web content portal, to make content immediately accessible to all 402 city employees.

“In the old days, people in our Community Development department had to visit our offsite storage facility three or four times a week in order to locate planning documents,” says Jacquez-Nares. “When you add up the 15-30 minutes it took to drive there, the time spent looking for relevant documents and then the time it took to drive back to City Hall, you’re talking about 4-5 hours a week. With Laserfiche, it only takes a few seconds to call up all necessary documentation.”

The impact of Laserfiche on the City Clerk’s Office has also been great. “As the lead office for Public Records Act Requests, we receive all records requests and hear directly from the public about their concerns,” says Jacquez-Nares. “With Laserfiche, citizens no longer have concerns about transparency or document integrity because digital records don’t get lost or damaged, and they’re available much faster than their paper-based counterparts.”

All the City’s departmental records are currently scanned into Laserfiche on a day-forward basis by Kelly Lore, the centralized scanning records clerk. Just a few of the different types of content stored in Westminster’s Laserfiche repository include:

• Agendas
• Agreements
• Bids
• Building permits and plans, including large format plans
• Deeds
• Planning Department records
• Staff reports

“All of our departments have access to Laserfiche, and people are always coming up with new ideas for how to use it,” says Jacquez-Nares. “It’s much more useful than Alchemy—and much easier to use!”

IT Support Is a Snap

For a city like Westminster, with an IT department of only five employees, software applications must not only be easy to use, but also easy to maintain and administer. In fact, Laserfiche is so easy to support that Jacquez-Nares serves as system administrator, working with users across the City’s departments to structure the City’s content repository, create index fields for various City forms, and set up Quick Fields sessions to automate information capture.

“IT staff members create a backup when they’re updating the server,” says Jacquez-Nares. “Other than that, they pretty much leave everything to do with Laserfiche up to me.”

Future-Forward

Westminster has exciting plans for Laserfiche moving forward. Incoming City Clerk Robin Roberts recognizes the efficiency that Laserfiche ECM brings to Westminster and seeks to build on the project’s success by promoting city-wide use of Laserfiche through added integrations and training sessions.

With the help of ECS, the team is currently in the process of integrating Laserfiche with the City’s GIS system so that all building plans associated with any given address are accessible from within Westminster’s GIS application, CityGIS. Similarly, the City is also working on integrating its electronic permitting application with both Laserfiche and CityGIS. These integrations will save staff from performing time-consuming research to locate information about various addresses or land parcels.

The City also has plans to upgrade to Laserfiche Avante, which will bring Workflow functionality into Westminster’s arsenal, enabling it to automate standard business processes such as approvals and document routing. According to Jacquez-Nares, Westminster is also contemplating integrating Laserfiche with SharePoint, which the City owns but has not yet rolled out. Using SharePoint as a collaborative portal would, for one, help the City Clerk’s Office generate agenda Council packets in a paperless manner. Combining Laserfiche with SharePoint would bring imaging capabilities to SharePoint and enhance the SharePoint repository.

Even without these system expansions, the City is extremely pleased with the Laserfiche implementation. “Many people had to work together to make this project a success, and it’s wonderful to see just how effective a collaborative management team can be,” concludes Jacquez-Nares. “People are using Laserfiche, and the positive results have been staggering so far.”

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.”

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.

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?’”

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.