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.

We live right in the heart of the area decimated by last week’s ice storm - Saratoga County, about half an hour west of Bennington, Vermont. The two towns adjacent to our own declared states of emergency the first night and only recently lifted them. Clifton Park was like a part of the “I Am Legend” set for several days: empty shopping malls, empty roads, empty everything.

Except for the power crews and the utility company trucks. The day after the ice storm - which could nearly be capitalized, like The Ice Storm that struck far northern New York and Canada a decade ago - the temperatures fell into the teens and the wind started to really go, something not unknown around here. The power crews were out in that weather, out in the woods hunting for and dealing with all kinds of truly dangerous situations, for 18 hour shifts.

The news said there were some 900 power crews out in our region, and of course a lot of them came from outside the area under the mutual assistance agreements the power companies have forged to deal with these kinds of situations. The other day I saw several Great Lakes Power Company trucks out on Grooms Road, and there are others from all over the place.

So this morning I was at a gas station filling up for today’s big snow event - over a foot is forecast - and got talking with a couple of guys who were gassing their trucks and talking about when they might get home. They’re both power company linemen: one from Michigan, the other from West Virginia. They’ve been in Saratoga County for a week today, and they were leaving immediately for Massachussets, trying to get out through the Berkshires before the snow really gets rolling.

I asked if they had any hope of getting home for Christmas, and they both just shook their heads and laughed. They are looking at maybe a up to a week in Massachussets, after which they have already been told they’ll be going direct to Iowa, which is having its own problems with the big midwest storm. After that, one guy said, who knows? Maybe a quick stop around New Year’s Day for the Michigan guy at least.

We live in this culture of immediacy, of no pleasure or privilege deferred, where the US Congress is trying to outlaw failure, apparently. The local radio call in shows were pretty calm for about two days before people started bitching, demanding investigations, railing at “these lazy utilty people” and much worse. This after a storm which left over a quarter of a million people without power. Doesn’t matter, everyone should be back in front of their TVs within a day or two regardless, and if not, then it has to be somebody’s fault!

And so when I ran across these guys filling their own trucks at Stewarts and grabbing a cup of coffee before heading off into a new storm to fix the damage from the last, in a state even further from both their homes, days before Christmas, and who miraculously were in good moods despite four or five hours sleep a night, it was kind of an epiphany. Much like the cops, these guys do what most people are not willing to, in circumstances that most people would not be able to deal with, and to them it’s just part of the job. Are they getting paid? Sure, and hopefully quite well. Does it make up for having to leave home at literally a moment’s notice to drive halfway across the country and give up the whole holiday season with their families, often for people who only complain about them when they stop in Stewart’s to warm up and catch a break for awhile? I don’t know, but I was happy to meet, talk to and thank these two particular people.

The photo is from the Albany Times Union, part of a great collection from this storm, at http://www.timesunion.com

We’re very proud to annouce that as of December 2, 2008, Steamboat has been accepted into the Filemaker Business Alliance, the international association of Filemaker developers. Steamboat itself - as well as PolicePro - had to pass a pretty thorough review process before we could say this. Added to our existing Filemaker TechNet membership, this enhances our relationship with Filemaker, Inc. as well as our general standing in the industry. Our clients can only benefit from the tighter relationship with and new business channel access to Filemaker that comes with this.

We hitched our wagon to Filemaker back in 1996. I’m personally very happy to get to this next level of the journey, and look foward to the next twelve years or so.