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.
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, “…document management 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.”
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, document imaging repository held over 300,000 active and historical incident reports, DNA records, MVC reports, pardon files and sudden death reports.
“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 document management software 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.”
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.
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