Brooklyn Park Police Department
As the northwest suburb of the bustling twin cities, Brooklyn Park, Minnesota is one of the largest metropolitan areas in the state. The city is home to the Brooklyn Park Police Department, which employs over 100 full-time officers and more than 50 non-sworn staff, serving a community of over 80,000 residents. The department receives approximately 60,000 calls per year, making any opportunity to effectively reduce turnaround on reporting a literal life saver, which is why smartphone dictation technology was introduced.
The department was no stranger to digital dictation; having first adopted a digital dictation system back in 1992. The officers went from handwriting reports to picking up a land line and dialing into the system to dictate. Lorelei Meyer, Support Services Manager, remembers the shift of going digital, “The digital system made a huge difference for us! We have clerical staff consisting of trained, skilled typists, who are familiar with productivity and formatting tools, whereas officers were handwriting reports back in the day, which were sometimes difficult to read and time-consuming for them. We had to take that handwritten document and type the information into our records management system. Depending on how long or legible the documents were, it could take some time to process.”
The technology served the team well for decades, until DigiDictate Mobile came along. The officers were eager to have dictation capabilities right in their pockets and they adapted to it quite quickly. “There was very little training needed and the transition went very smoothly,” says Meyer. “We have a new generation of millenials in law enforcement who are used to accessing their smart phones to do their jobs. Having a mobile app at their fingertips to document incidents fits extremely well into their daily tasks.”
With the ability to document incidents immediately from their squad cars, officers were now able to spend more time in the community, where they were needed, instead of at their desks doing paperwork. According to Ms. Meyer, “Officers are dictating their reports sooner because they have their mobile devices readily available to document, where before they would have to come back into a city building, find a landline phone and dictate their report.”
The speed with which the officers are dictating is also improving response times for the investigative teams. “Information is going directly into our record management system and is then immediately available for our investigative staff to start their analysis of the cases. As soon as it’s been transcribed to our system, it’s there and available,” adds Ms. Meyer.
In addition to the efficiency improvements experienced by the police force, with one less server to manage, the IT department has seen time and cost savings as well. However, the officers are seeing the biggest benefits. As Meyer puts it, “Mobile dictation has been a great thing for us. The officers love it because they know that typing is not their best skill, their skill is to be out on the street and dealing with problems in the community.”
The roll-out of DigiDictate Mobile has been an overall success, as Ms. Meyer states, “I would absolutely recommend Crescendo to other law enforcement agencies. The staff at Crescendo has been really great, their support was available when we needed them and we had the mobile app functioning successfully in a very short period of time.”
For more information about mobile smartphone reporting, Contact us!
