Relational Database Management Systems 101: Why PolicePro works like that
PolicePro is a relational database management system (RDBMS, in geek lingo). The concept of relational databases goes back to the early 1970s, and is generally considered to have gotten its start in a white paper written by IBM Fellow Ted Codd. Until Codd - and others - started thinking about it, computer databases were "flat file" hierarchical or similar systems. Relational thinking opened up doors that a lot of companies spent years going through to come up with the database systems that run and track virtually everything today.
Before your eyes glaze over, we'll accept the last forty or so years and focus on what you might actually want to understand about how PolicePro works. PolicePro is a number of database files - about 40, in most v6 installs - that relate to each other in what are known as One-to-Many relationships.
In its simplest form, imagine the phone rings at the communications desk. The call is for a larceny from a car parked in a parking lot. The dispatcher takes the call, logs the pertinent information, and dispatches an officer. Because it's a quiet day, maybe two patrol cars swing by. They interview the victim and two people who happened to be walking by when they saw a white male break into the car, grab a pile of CDs and a laptop computer from inside, and jump into the passenger seat of a pickup truck which then sped away. A short time later, another officer stops the truck and grabs two males inside: the driver and the guy who is eventually identified as the thief. At the end of the day, both are arrested, the property is recovered, and the paperwork is all done.
In database terms, we've just described a "Christmas Tree" effect of a series of one to many relationships. The initial call represents one event, the larceny. The dispatcher then caused the involvement of one or more (three in this case) officers: one incident, many cops. They took a report involving many items of stolen property, again all relating to this one event. They then interviewed one or many people, and ended up making one or many arrests - two here, the actual thief and the driver working with him.
Now we go to another level of one to many relationships, and the tree starts to get wider as we move down from the top. Each person arrested is now facing one or many criminal charges: maybe larceny and possession of stolen property for guy #1, while his partner is looking at possession of stolen property and criminal facilitation (for driving the getaway car). Again, all this stuff stems from one incident, but as more people get involved, new levels of relationships come into play - but in the end, they all have to relate to and be easily associated with that single theft call.
You can figure the rest out. Two bad guys facing different charges, though on the same arrest incident, are going to require one or more criminal complaints and statements to tie them into the crime and get them in front of a judge. All that stolen property is going to go into Evidence, where perhaps one or more pieces may go to the lab for fingerprints or DNA work, to tie that spot of blood on a CD case from when this idiot broke the window to the bad guy, since it turns out this is a bigger case than anyone thought, since these two are also suspects in a series of robberies.
Robberies? Here come the detectives, out for (literally) blood! One or many detectives, a ton of interviews, lead sheets all over the place, lots of reports, and aren't you glad you have a computer system that helps you make sense of it all.
PolicePro, being a Filemaker-based product, uses the concept of portals to look at all this stuff in ways that are easy to understand. When you look at a PolicePro dispatch screen, you are actually looking at three files and two One-To-Many relationships: the PolicePro incident file holds the basic larceny information. The Officers fields (a piece of information resides in a field, like a name or phone number) are a portal to the one to many Officers file, since you may have had one cop go on this job, or the whole shift. The Stolen Property fields are another portal showing the one to many Stolen relationship, since there could be many lines worth of stolen property. Portals in PolicePro are virtually infinite: if your department has a particularly busy day and arrests one million protesters at a march, PolicePro will hold them all, as long as someone types it in.
PolicePro allows the user to build virtual case folders on all incidents. At any time, every piece of paper concerning any incident can be printed out by clicking one button and standing in front of the the printer while it all comes out. Navigation is simple, using the tabs across the top of every screen to move around within a given incident. Hopefully you now have a nice, basic understanding of why that is.