Most of the best features in PolicePro come from the users; things I never would have thought of that turn out to be so valuable to everyone else once they’re introduced. One of the more recent - and popular - of these is Restricted Access to certain information: the Need To Know scenario.

Police agencies handle a lot of sensitive information that perhaps should not be readily available to all officers. The one that jumps out at you, and where this feature started, is sex offenses. Beyond the detectives who may write a criminal complaint or deposition containing sexual information, the bosses and the prosecutors, you may want to keep this stuff under wraps but still available in the system. The same thing is true for certain internal investigations or, for that matter, virtually anything that a supervisor or Chief wants to restrict for whatever reason.

Another one that sounds easy at first but turns out to be tougher to implement than it looks. We went with a model that can restrict access to any Criminal Complaint, Supporting Deposition, Narrative Report or Evidence record. Restriction is at the discretion of the person who generated that record or anyone up the supervisory chain from that person. For instance, a detective can restrict a Deposition, as can any detective supervisor who reviews it. Once restricted, only the person who initiated the restriction or a member of a higher privilege set (the bosses) can release the restriction.

But isn’t this going to piss off the line officers at some point? Everyone hates the “You Do Not Belong Here” message! We dealt with this potential issue using an old magic trick: it seems to disappear!

Once a record is Restricted, the flag that indicates the very existance of that record just goes away for anyone who is not authorized to see it. Therefore, a detective sergeant looking at the Dispatch record for a Rape case sees the flags that indicate depositions and reports, but a patrol cop out in car 7 looking at the same record isn’t aware those records even exist.

Here’s a shot of a Dispatch report on an apparent domestic assault. You can see right away that a Complaint exists on this case by virtue of the Complaint flag.



Clicking that flag of course takes you to the relevant Complaint:



To restrict the Complaint record, an authorized person can simply click the check box next to the Record Lock icon:



When you return to the Dispatch record for this incident and log on as a “regular” user, the checkmark as well as the navigation ability to that Complaint are gone:



If there were mutliple Complaints (or narratives, etc.) on this case, the check mark would remain and navigation to those open records would still be enabled; but access to the restricted records still would apply. Even if a user decides to get tricky and try to scroll through records, they cannot get to, export, print or in any other way access a record once it’s been restricted.

Restrict and Open events, like locking events, are all tracked internally by PolicePro and those events become part of a Restriction log that is itself restricted all the way up to a System Administrator privilege set.

The result of all this? Real Need To Know access on sensitive records while maintaining the usual ease of search and ready access to information that is the trademark of PolicePro.

Thanks to the Hastings Police Department in New York and detective sergeant Bon Palumbo and lieutenant Dave Bloomer for bringing this up. This feature is emerging as one of the most popular, apparently second only to the universally loved File Cabinet.

This kind of detail is found throughout PolicePro. Everything has been thought out and discussed with end users to make sure that the function works in the real world as well as in my head. I’ll show some more stuff like this in future posts.