Line of Business
Peel police boosts public safety with new records management system
The Peel police - one of Canada's largest police services - says a new records management system is helping it to better accomplish its chief mandate - keeping the public safe.4/17/2008 7:00:00 AM By: Vawn Himmelsbach
One of Canada's largest police services – the Peel Police in Ontario – have gone live with a new records management system, which includes everything from digital mug shots to court case preparation to Statistics Canada reporting capabilities.
The force serves a policing area of 1.2 million citizens, and receives 252,000 calls for service every year.
“Police organizations develop plans and courses of action based on the information they have,” said Staff Sergeant Romano Calvano, who also served as the project manager on Project Phoenix.
“So we need to have competencies in the information we're acting upon because people's lives could be at stake.”
For instance, he said if a police officer stopped someone at 3 am, and that person was wanted, the officer would need to have accurate information to make decisions.
“If we were negligent in either not updating or modifying that information when we ought to have, there's a liability issue,” he said. “But even more importantly there's a risk to the public and by extension to the officer.”
The Peel Police previously used an in-house records management system called Unified Crime Reporting.
Fifteen years ago, it was state of the art, but not anymore.
So the force looked at newer products on the market, and eventually chose Niche Records Management System (RMS) from Winnipeg-based Niche Technology Inc.,
Its legacy system will be left running as read-only, since there's still information in it.
But moving forward, all information will go into the new system.
“This project was much less about installing software, and much more about business change,” said Calvano.
He said the business change was needed “to take advantage of the efficiencies inherent in the application."
The project team examined more than 230 processes – it sent people out into the field to investigate all areas of the organization with a dependency on records management, and then documented how they do business.
Page Navigation 1) Up to date information is needed "because people's lives could be at stake.”2) Niche also provides the capability for inter-agency sharing.
3) “We're enabling police agencies to reuse the same information.”
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