Wireless Reporting Speeds Police Paperwork

For more than four years, police officers with the City of Pasco Police Department in Pasco, WA, have been able to fill out police incident reports from their squad car laptops, but they must still come into headquarters to download the reports.

To help eliminate this logistics bottleneck, the department has selected the FormStream forms presentment system from Netdelivery (www.netdelivery.com), Boulder, CO. The FormStream software breaks large forms into small data packets that can be reliably and sercurely delivered with wireless technologies. Officers on duty will soon be able to wirelessly deliver reports to headquarters from their squad cars. The software will also allow officers to attach digital files, such as pictures from a crime scene, to their reports.

The department has already begun rolling out FormStream, and installation and training was expected to be completed within 90 days. By reducing the submission process from a half hour down to a few seconds, the police department estimates it will save more than $65,000 per year.

Using FormStream, reports can also be electronically distributed to multiple parties within the approval chain while still archiving a single report copy in the department's database and legacy systems. Each time the file is accessed, the system will electronically update the reporting log, keeping an audit trail throughout the document's life cycle.

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