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How digital document management helped San Francisco Police put an end to time-stealing paperwork

Global Municipal Exchange, January 2007

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

—Lieutenant Jack Ballentine,
San Francisco Police

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.

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."