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 “Even back in 2004, I knew the system was outdated,” says Stafford, whose area of responsibility grew to include LBPD’s Technology Division in 2008.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.”