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Why Bar Code Your
Property Room?
Our experience with over 100 police departments has shown
us a number of reasons for automating the property and evidence
function with the use of bar codes. Just a few of those
reasons are listed below.
Desire to Manage the Property/Evidence Function Better.
It is nearly impossible to have management staff oversee
every action within the property room, but with TraQ's flexible
reporting, a manager can easily see what is going on. TraQ's
add-on, "Jreport" even goes so far as determining
how many items each property clerk has handled during a
given period. By providing these kinds of statistics, management
can clearly determine present and future staffing needs
of the Property function.
Need an Automated Way to Clear
Property out of the Property Room.
It is fairly easy to bring items into the property inventory.
The tough part is getting rid of them. Without an automated
means of reviewing cases for release or destruction, the
property room may need it's physical warehousing capacity
doubled every 30 to 36 months. TraQ can be designed with
"action" fields to provide regular reporting on
items that can be moved out of the property room, and if
that's not enough, TraQ's letter module provides the ability
to send out notification letters and track the response
of owners to these letters.
The Agency wants to do Statistical
Analysis and Reporting on the "Kinds of Property"
Being Seized.
More and more frequently the media or a public interest
group contacts a department and asks "How many guns
did you take off the street last year" "How much
narcotics did you seize." Without Evidence TraQ your
answer is either vague, "oh, quite a lot," "several
dozen," or some other unsubstantiated guess, or, your
Property Clerk has to physically count items in the storage
locations. There is no reasonable way to provide quick,
accurate answers to these questions without an electronic
system. With Evidence TraQ you can almost instantly get
answers to these and many other questions - down to the
smallest detail. You want to know how many pounds of methamphetamine
were recovered in 1997 No sweat - you will know within 5
minutes. Want to know if more assault rifles were seized
this year than last year A TraQ user with minimal experience
in running reports can obtain the answers almost immediately.
One Agency intends to use TraQ to help it write grants for
other funding, the agency will be generating reports on
the number of weapons seized in domestic violence situations
in order to obtain funding for "prevention of violence
against women" programs. They state that the grant
money they anticipate receiving will more than pay for TraQ.
Tired of Paying Claims for
Lost Property.
That wedding ring that you can't find is someone's heirloom,
and if you don't think it is worth much, wait until you
see the claim they file. The Property Section has an obligation
to safeguard the property in its possession, if you fail
to do so you must reimburse the owner for it. A few claims
over the course of a year easily pay for the TraQ system.
Get Rid of Paperwork.
Running a property room with a manual system involves tons
of paperwork. You have property tags, property receipts
or reports, gun logs, narcotics logs, release signature
logs… Every new piece of property, every transferred
piece of property requires a signature or notation on a
piece of paper somewhere. With TraQ you eliminate the paperwork;
the complete history of the item is kept within your database,
and if you purchase the digital signature option you can
also track the person receiving the property. One agency
told me they wanted TraQ because they were concerned about
the possibility of their Property Clerk getting a repetitive
stress injury. The clerk had to pull large, heavy binders
off of shelves hundreds of times a day to find out the status
and location of evidence. She had already been treated for
tendonitis and had been warned by her doctor to find some
other means of looking up the information she needed. TraQ
eliminates the necessity for physical searches of volumes
of paper and puts information at your fingertips without
leaving your desk.
Avoid Redundant Entry of Data.
Most jurisdictions have laws that require you to follow
and document the "chain of custody" of a piece
of evidence - from the time it is seized until it is released.
With a manual system, this starts out with the Officer taking
a report, then the report going to records where it is keyed
into a records management system. Finally, the Property
Room receives the property and begins their own paper trail
of the movement of that property. Everyone is entering the
same data, over and over again… With TraQ's Paperless
Property Room function and links to your RMS system, the
person who knows the most about the property, the Officer,
does the data entry - his record is received by the property
room with the property where it is checked for accuracy
before it is transferred to the Property Room's TraQ system.
Once it is accepted into the TraQ database, the Property
Room uploads the data to the Records Management System.
One entry instead of three!
Desire to Perform Audits.
It is only after you have tried to do an audit with a manual
system that you begin to appreciate the inventory functions
of TraQ. A manual audit requires physically checking each
item in a location and consulting the appropriate paperwork
for each item. Yet, even after you do that, you have NO
idea what should be in that location unless you check every
single property record in your possession and go hunt for
each item listed on the sheet. As a result, the accepted
way to do an audit in a Property Room without a TraQ system
is by choosing a few records at random and making sure the
items exist and the chain of custody is accurate. With TraQ,
you can audit every item in every location in your property
room and generate instant results showing "what is
missing" "what is in the wrong location"
and "what items are present in a location but not in
the database." TraQ's complete audit trail shows every
change to every field so you can readily ensure that weights,
amounts, descriptions, and release information were not
edited or deleted.
Need a Way to Collect Information
at a Crime/Search Warrant Scene.
After the OJ Simpson case, Police Departments are more aware
than ever of the necessity of careful handling of evidence
at a crime scene. Evidence can easily be collected with
TraQ's Portable Hand Held scanners which time stamp the
collection of each item with the time and date. With TraQ,
evidence can be collected by entering minimal information,
adding a bar code and securing the evidence until it can
be brought to the station. Once the evidence is secure at
the station, more details can be added to the record. If
desired, TraQ can be used to follow laboratory requests
and analysis results, thus providing a single, concise,
audit proof record of everything that has happened to the
item from the very moment it was collected until it was
released or destroyed.
Does your RMS or CAD System
has a bar code evidence module
So your RMS or CAD system already has an evidence module
and it sports bar codes Why should you investigate a specialty
system separate from others for managing your property and
evidence Grade it on the following test:
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Does it save time entering data into the computer
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Do you devote most of your resources to entering data,
but you never get anything back in terms of reports you
or your commander need from it
- Does
it have an audit trail or just a chain of custody
-
Does it cut out the paperwork street officers and property
technicians have to deal with
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Can you get activity reports from the system
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Can you take inventory quickly, easily, and accurately
with a bar code scanner
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Do you still have problems finding misplaced items at
times
- Do
you or your staff enter the same data items into the system
two or more times
If your current system doesn't make the grade, look
into Evidence TraQ and release the constraints on your property
room function. |
