CHANTILLY, Va - Records Management Systems were designed to store and organize data. They account for incident and investigative activities and help with reporting. Most RMS systems add on a module to record and store evidence data, primarily to support NIBRS and/or UCR reporting. However, important for state and Federal reporting, simple evidence data is only one facet of managing the physical items that must be secured safely in the property room. That stuff (90 percent of it is junk) must be secured, moved, inventoried, and treated like crown jewels; that is until the case is closed or beyond its statute of limitations. Then, it needs to be purged to make more room.
Storing Isn’t Managing
The ability to store evidence data no more manages physical items on property room shelves than data in an accounting system runs a warehouse. Records systems, because they focus on recording evidence data, are little more than spread sheets. They are not up to the more complex tasks involved in “managing” the underlying physical items. For that reason, they can be costly to an agency.
Extra Tangential Officer Time
The standard reasoning for using an RMS evidence module is to avoid duplication of data entry by the officer or deputy. There are faults here. RMS data entry screens are clumsy and difficult to use. Few to none use the current software technology that makes the internet so universally easy. Most property officers can enter data from forms into a PC faster than it takes the officer to key it and the property room to review for accuracy and correct errors.
Moreover, unless the RMS module is customized to remove other manual forms with evidence data, the officer/deputy has extra paperwork after entering evidence data. A fully automated evidence system can eliminate such tangential paperwork and save officer time by generating other forms, such as a currency count, ATF trace forms, lab request form, etc, that are not in most records systems.
Opening for Malfeasance
Evidence systems and most RMS evidence modules keep an automated chain of evidence. That assures the court that unauthorized persons have not had access to an item of evidence. But the chain of custody doesn’t protect the agency from itself. It doesn’t prevent malfeasance in the property room. An audit trail is needed for that.
We know of no RMS system that keeps an audit trail of every access to evidence data and to every change in a values in evidence fields. This gap removes a check on who is accessing the data or recording, when the value in a field descriptor is changed, such as correcting the weight of a narcotics package or the amount of money in a currency envelop. Absent of an audit trail, there is no record of the change, what it was, who did it, and when. These gaps are openings for misuse and fraud in an RMS evidence module.
Hard to Search
Once stored in the RMS evidence module, the information that the evidence officer needs should be right at his or her fingertips. S/he should be able to search for and list items in any way s/he needs, for instance to help the little old lady who wants to recover her black purse and knows neither the case number nor the officer’s name. It should be able to list all of the firearms or cash or currency with a few mouse clicks. Moreover this list should be able to be printed as an ad hoc report.
Providing this type of information to answer phone calls is the unseen part of property and evidence. As after thoughts to the central functions of an RMS, their evidence modules provide only rudimentary search capabilities.
Without strong search capabilities in the evidence module, such as those that exist for other parts of the RMS, the task of managing evidence items consumes extra time. The property room reaps neither the benefits of automation or nor gains from the labor expended to enter data.
Invisible Operations
Records systems provide law enforcement executives with a raft of information about all sorts of activities of patrol officers and investigators that make their operations visible. Though of lessor priority, that is not true of property room operations. Top management knows little of what goes on there. Moreover, because of their priority they are often banished to the basement or “out back,” so to speak. They may be doubly invisible because RMS evidence modules (and most traditional automated systems as well) provide a few limited reports or require users to learn the powerful, but intricate, third party report tools such as Crystal Reports. (Most dedicated evidence systems suffer from this same problem.) IT staff with little extra time themselves, must get involved to run reports…a cost, hidden but still a cost. If they don’t run reports from the data, property officers need to search through supporting paperwork if information is available. Alternatively managers have no information about what goes on down there, sometimes to the regret of the Chief or Sheriff.
Physical Inventory
Verifying the property and evidence is not missing requires total physical inventory audit. CALEA requires a full inventory when property room supervisors change. While RMS evidence modules throw in the necessary barcode printers and mobile barcode scanners to make inventories possible, in many, if not most, cases the scanners don’t work. Without barcodes and scanners that work the property room may only discover missing items, when they are needed for court. The press is full of instances where officers, property technicians, and even law enforcement executives, have been arrested because of items taken from the property room.
Additional Storage Costs
The most easily quantifiable cost of trying to manage evidence with an RMS evidence module (or with most dedicated evidence systems) derives from the difficulty of purging property. Not only is it hard to find out what property is potentially eligible for disposition, but once identified, getting approval of investigators or the courts is manual and paper intensive. For that reason the amount of space required grows inexorably. One client after being forced to use an RMS system, after using QueTel for several years, saw dispositions fall 20,000 items in the space of a year. As a last resort agencies purchase moveable shelving at $10,000 a row or buy or rent additional space at many times the cost of shelving. One chief lamented that he was in the process of spending $2 million to build a new property room. A dedicated evidence software system should free up property officer time to spend in disposing of items and automate the process, so that it becomes easy to keep up with getting unneeded evidence out the door.
Best of Both
To provide agencies with the best of both—their chosen RMS and a specialized property and evidence system—some evidence system vendors can develop an interface between the two. Officers can enter case and involved persons data in the RMS and use the specialized evidence system to manage the evidence thereafter.
QueTel Corporation of Chantilly, Virginia, has had significant success with various interfaces. Its success has meant less officer time handling evidence; less paperwork and manual handling by property officers; easier and more powerful searches; time saving alerts; easy to learn, built in management statistics; automated disposition processing; and reduced shelving and space costs.
Dashboard
To make the property room visible Evidence TraQ presents key data about the property room and its activities in a graphical format. This “dashboard” gives top managers the same instant visual into property room operations as their RMS gives them of field and investigative activities.
IT Management
No other evidence system has such powerful capabilities and ease of IT management. There is no client to install and security is built around the use of Active Directory. In addition the system keeps an error log and provides a report of system diagnostics, along with keeping a log of all user activity on the system—each log on successful or unsuccessful, searches conducted, and how many records were returned.
About QueTel:
QueTel’s software saves time and increases accountability for law enforcement agencies. The TraQ Suite family of applications encompasses evidence management, digital evidence management (including redacation), forensic laboratory management (LIMS), and quartermaster inventory. For 25 years, we have served agencies with implementation services, consulting, and, recently, BWC video redaction services.