Marathon County in Wisconsin is saving $100,000 annually and eliminating costly lawsuits by replacing an older, paper-based system for creating and maintaining arrest warrants with electronic document management software.
Under the previous system, county judges would authorize a paper warrant, which would be sent via interoffice mail from the court clerk to the Marathon Sheriff’s Department. Once received, department staff would affix a label with the subject’s name and date of birth to a manila folder and place the warrant inside. Any additional notes were kept on a green cover sheet attached to the folder. The sheriff’s office then printed all of the supporting documentation for the warrant and forwarded the folder to validation officers tasked with verifying that the warrant was complete and ready for execution.
In the event of a warrant cancellation, a sheriff’s department employee would complete the necessary information on the green cover sheet and place the documents into yet another folder, which the officer would then place in the canceled warrants filing cabinet. Occasionally, certain additional paperwork needed to be faxed to the jail and/or filled out and sent to the court clerk.
This paper-based system resulted in inherent delays in the time between a judge approving a warrant and it being issued to officers in the field. It also produced delays between a warrant’s satisfaction, such as through the payment of a fine, and the warrant being officially canceled. Some criminals stayed on the street longer than they should have while others were wrongfully arrested when the warrants had been satisfied, according to Tony Nardi, the department’s supervisor of dispatch. As the paper piled up, so did the delays. So Nardi sought assistance from the City-County Information Technology Commission. The commission recommended business process automation software to reduce the paper and the work involved in processing and maintaining county arrest warrants.
The perks of automation
The software starts with the commission’s Laserfiche electronic records management system. After turning the paper-based records into electronic images, various software modules within the system make the information within those records more readily available. More importantly, the software can also distribute that information as needed according to rules the commission set up with assistance from Laserfiche reseller Cities Digital, which serves the upper Midwest region.
Now, after a judge authorizes a warrant, the documents involved are sent as electronic images via a secure internet portal directly to the clerk of courts where they are imported to the electronic records repository. This gives dispatchers immediate access to any change in warrant status via the system’s WebLink software. “It has turned out to be a fantastic system and it took us less than a year to get it up and running,” Nardi says. “At this point, we’ve reduced our potential liability from false arrests while streamlining the entire process from days to hours.” That means savings of at least two hours on each of the hundreds of warrants the county processes each month, as well as untold savings in reduced liability exposure. In addition to the savings on warrant processing time, officers can now validate warrants instantly rather than reviewing files once a month. The new system is also eliminating paper, filing cabinet and storage costs.
Business process automation also enables the department to cancel approximately 1,000 warrants that no longer need to be validated yearly. The county averages 4,000 active warrants each month. With the new system, the days-long processes of issuing and canceling paper warrants are now done digitally in a few hours or less. The dozen or so false arrests made each year were reduced to one in 2016, Nardi says.
Security is another attractive feature of the system. Unauthorized access to warrant information is prevented through robust security features. The system has some 1,000 to 1,500 users county-wide across 28 different departments. “Dispatchers can go in and very quickly look up the information and supply it in seconds to officers in the field,” says Commission IT Analyst Heather Giddings. “But that access is limited. The communication process was much slower and less secure when they were using paper.”
At the time of writing, Marathon was the only county within Wisconsin using business process management software to handle warrant arrests, but Giddings expects that will change as the county’s success with the technology expands. Next on the list at the Sheriff’s Department is applying business process automation technology to processing and enforcing court orders such as injunctions and restraining orders. “We have a whole list of projects throughout county operations I can see us using business process automation for,” Giddings says. “The more we work with it, the more we find we can do with it.”
