Doug Owens
Director of Implementation
When law enforcement personnel can easily share information across shifts, all officers are more informed about pressing matters to the ultimate benefit of the public. While many police departments have traditionally used email or a pass on book to update officers about events that occurred during previous shifts, SmartForce offers a smart roll-call pass-on and shift briefing feature that improves the process. Learn about the risks of using email and how SmartForce can help.
Why Email Isn’t Great for Roll-Call Pass-On or Shift Briefings
Yes, email is easy and it is what your officers are used to. Unfortunately, email isn’t great for policing and is not CJIS compliant.
Imagine if a Detective distributes an email agency wide about a suspect in a missing person’s case. As time passes on, everyone forgets about the suspect, and then there is a similar incident in the same location. Will your officers remember the email about the suspect? During uncommitted time, will they know to look for the suspect in that location?
When every minute that passes risks the life of a missing person and compromises an investigation, your officers need to have valuable information at their fingertips. Intelligence and information that is buried in an email chain from months past is not an effective way to communicate.
Or how about this scenario? An email is distributed agency wide about a police response for an upcoming community outreach event. It is a low priority, and some officers decide not to read all of the emails.
Flash forward to the event and your officers do not meet their obligations to the community because some of them forgot to (or chose not to) read the emails. Community perception of the police response suffers as a result.
These are just a couple of reasons why email is not optimal for information sharing. And there are many more!
SmartForce’s Shift Briefing Feature
SmartForce comes with a module expressly designed for easy, useful, and mobile information sharing. Our Shift Briefing feature pushes out information and intelligence to officers’ mobile devices so that officers in the field or heading in for their shift will have immediate access to critical information. The Shift Briefing feature allows you to target your intelligence and information to specific audiences like districts, sectors, precincts, beats or patrol areas. Now, police officers can start their shift without having to report to operations or a substation. They will be informed of key issues or agenda items, so decision-making happens faster.
SmartForce allows you to assign items directly to officers or squads, ensuring that tasks are completed. Follow-up is as easy as looking up which tasks have been completed and communicating with teams that haven’t finished their work yet. If a task needs to be passed on to the next shift, it just takes a few clicks.
Choose between sharing information agency-wide or on the district or shift level. Not everyone needs to know about outstanding assigned equipment or team meetings, but all districts may want to know about an officer safety threat or a pending storm. Likewise, a small town police department may wish to push shift briefing information to all staff, while a larger agency may want to send the information to specific district officers.
To learn more about the robust features of SmartForce, or watch a demo video that outlines all of the software’s features and benefits, click here.
