Agencies Reduce Duplicate Records
October 08, 2019 by Dana Rasmussen
When dispatchers or officers don’t have reliably accurate information, it slows response times and can impact the safety of responders and the community.
The Laramie County Sheriff’s Office in Wyoming was using a public safety software system that didn’t meet the data demands of a modern agency. It frequently generated duplicate or multiple information sets on the same individual, leading to an overabundance of paperwork to sort through when dispatchers or first responders needed quick information.
“We used to write all of our reports in Microsoft Word, send the reports to a folder on our network drive, and then it would sit there until the records department could review it,” systems administrator Dominic Davis said. “A records clerk would need to fill out the entire case and copy the comments, which was very time consuming and could inadvertently lead to errors and mistakes. They also had to determine uniform crime reporting data and statutes, which really increased the time spent on these items.”
In addition to causing an intense workload, the duplication of information sets and files caused so much extra work for records personnel that they knew they needed a better method. In fact, the IT department for Laramie County determined that the sheriff’s office had 32% of its records duplicated and 57% of records were duplicated in the police department.
“Having multiple jackets and reports causes a lot of headaches,” Davis said. “It made it difficult to assign warrants in some cases.”
To fix this issue, Laramie County upgraded its software to include modern functionality that would help streamline processes, reduce redundancies, and help civilian staff get the proper information to sworn officers as quickly as possible.
“As soon as we upgraded to a new system, we ran a report and discovered we had less than a tenth of a percent of duplicate records at that point,” Davis said.
With a modern system, Laramie County can now consolidate information so that all records are accurate and readily accessible. This helps officers in the field serve warrants, perform accurate background checks on the scene, and get the information they need, when they need it.
“It’s massively helpful having clean records,” Davis said. “It reduces the workload and makes staff so much more efficient. In the end, it really helps us provide better services to the community because we spend less time sorting through bad data and more time pulling out the information needed.”