Atlanta Police Department Improves Public Access to Documents

In Atlanta, every police call results in an incident report. Every car crash ends with an accident report. City law requires that these documents be made available quickly to private citizens and insurance companies.

Before the 1996 Olympics, the Atlanta Police Department (APD) was overwhelmed with paper. This made it very difficult to follow both the letter and the spirit of the law. Instead of hiring an additional 70 people to process the paper, police administrators turned to the City of Atlanta Bureau of Management Information Systems for help.

Its director, John Cuffie, looked at various systems and finally chose Com Squared's (Atlanta, GA 770-263-4990) System because it worked with their Criminal Justice Information System (CJIS), the City's ongoing data warehousing project of VT Prism and Inslaw software on an IBM mainframe.

More than 1,000 daily incident and accident reports are filed at the downtown police annex every day. Reports average 12 pages, so APD clerks deal with more than four million sheets of paper annually. While most of the files have been accumulating since the 1970s, some are much older. Murder records are kept on file for 100 years.

Before Com Squared's solution, records were kept on paper and microfilm. Storage was one problem. Access was another. Soon after an incident or accident, insurance companies and private citizens start requesting documents. Most individuals want photocopies. Insurance companies and attorneys want the information faxed out as soon as possible.

Reports were indexed by the name of the person involved, their birthdate and the incident/accident location. They were sometimes misfiled, causing long delays when information was needed.

Getting paper refiled correctly after the first use was a serious problem. "After finally finding a document it was difficult to insure that papers were properly refiled," says Cuffie. "We could not guarantee that the documents we delivered the first time would be available the second, third or fourth time they were requested."

The APD solution is pure document imaging. When paper reports arrive at the police annex they are scanned and stored twice: first on an 80 gigabyte RAID (magnetic) system for quick access. Then they're put on an optical disc for archive and security. The lag time between incidents/accidents and document availability used to exceed a week. Now it's less than 48 hours in almost all incidences.

Hierarchical Storage Management ensures that in 90% of retrieval requests, the information is delivered in a split second. Even dated information from the optical disc appears on an operator's screen within 15 seconds. This compares to a paper-based, best case scenario of 5-10 minutes.

Indexing improvements took a quantum leap forward. UNISearch gives the Atlanta Police Department 12 field indexes. This "Quick Search" capability is in stark contrast to the previous system where the records were only available by case number.

Data accuracy has improved as well. Under the old, paper-based system, data entry was a back-end process with duplicate entry for mainframe updates. Using barcoded forms, UNISearch image-enables the data entry. The images are indexed and the mainframe is updated simultaneously. There is no more back-end entry. Forms mapping and zooming minimizes errors.

Lieutenant Deborah Cox says they also get big savings from integrated fax. "Before, when an insurance company or attorney wanted a copy of an accident or incident report, we found the paper, took it to the fax machine and refiled the documents. Now a few keystrokes take care of the whole job. We can also measure the productivity of each worker."

In the future the APD hopes to provide attorneys and insurance companies with direct access to the UNISearch system over the Internet. Security issues are being resolved. The Fulton County District Attorney's office already has remote access to the reports.

Cuffie wants to extend imaging to other areas of Atlanta City Government. "We want to manage from an enterprise standpoint," he says. "Uptime is critical to our departments of aviation, finance, purchasing and traffic court."