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Tucson Police Department eCase Manager

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T he Tucson Police Department (TPD) is in the RFP stage implementing an Automated Field Reporting System (AFRS) to provide officers and field personnel with the ability to create electronic case reports. The goal of the TPD administration is for TPD to eventually adopt a completely electric case reporting system. Such a system would address a number of problems with TPD's internal and external information flows.

First, it would address the critical storage space shortage caused by storage of paper documents. TPD's main business of investigation and follow up of criminal and non-criminal events is extremely document and information intensive, and these documents must be stored for extensive periods of time.

Second, access to the information captured in this documentation is extremely cumbersome in its present form; most of the information is never entered electronically, so it is only accessible by retrieving and copying the paper documents. Information access systems TPD is implementing such as COPLINK (a multi-agency case data sharing system) can only share information that has been created or entered electronically. By implementing an AFRS, TPD hopes to address these problems.

However, the TPD Data Services Section (TPD's IT branch) has identified a limitation in many of the AFRS implementations offered by vendors. These systems do not address management of the many other document types that are created outside the AFRS, such as digital photographs of crime scenes, or transcribed statements created in word processing programs such as MS Word, In addition, these systems do not preserve the authenticity and integrity of the electronic documents over time.

TPD Data Services personnel have been searching for a solution to this dilemma, and developed a plan that may possibly address these problems. The MIS531b project group known as 'Gang of Five' accepted a request to implement a prototype database application to model a solution that TPD DSS personnel are considering. This proof of concept will serve to provide a system design against which to evaluate vendor offerings, as well as a model to identify any shortcomings inherent in the proposed solution.

The group implemented a prototype to meet a majority of the criteria on a specifications list developed by TPD. The criteria that were not implemented were placed in an implementation plan included in this report for an operational version of the system.

'The Gang of Five' group implemented their prototype using an Oracle Database, Apache Web Server, and a browser-based interface incorporating JSP and using Java Servlets, The final results were presented to the Tucson Police Department Data Service Section supervisor and project sponsor.

Please click HERE for a PowerPoint presentation of the project.

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