The Boston Police Department

In searching for a state-of-the-art evidence tracking solution, The Boston Police Department had a specific goal in mind; Seamlessly integrate the entire process of evidence management and make it easier for each of its divisions and courts to work together. Their solution was Tracker Products software.

On August 11, 2008, Tracker Products software went live at the Boston police department. It was a huge day for both sides of the partnership. Tracker’s program now allows an unlimited number of persons from each of the 42 units to access the history and updated status of every piece of evidence the police handle. The sheer volume is daunting, but the system for tracking it is anything but. And while police departments throughout the U.S., literally from coast to coast, have been using Tracker Products software for years with terrific success, the Boston case represents one of the biggest challenges the Florence, Kentucky-based company has ever faced. But also one of its' biggest victories.

The story of the Boston Police Department’s reliance on Tracker Products now has a successful ending. The beginning, however, was a bit more unassuming. Here is that story.

When a lieutenant with the Boston Police Department “BPD” Evidence Control Unit “ECU” approached a Tracker Products display booth at a trade show in Boston in October of 2006, neither side realized how well the relationship would go. There was, of course, your typical trade-show back-and-forth, the kind of friendly if non-committal banter that occurs at a trade show.

Weeks later, Tracker Products got a phone call asking if they would come to Boston to demo their evidence tracking application. Attending the demo were representatives from the police department’s ECU, crime lab, latent prints, ballistics, crime scene response and network operations units. Show us how it works, they said.

A personnel shift at Boston PD brought a new commander, who clearly saw that the department’s system for tracking and managing evidence would benefit from an overhaul. With increasing demands and numerous advances in technology in recent years, it made sense to explore new tracking possibilities.

When Tracker Products came back to Boston for a second presentation with the evidence unit’s new leadership, the first objective for Tracker was to assess the department’s current limitations. That assessment took nearly an entire day. At that point, Tracker Products began formulating a plan designed specifically for the Boston PD’s needs.

It was essentially a 10-part plan:

1. There would need to be one application that covered everything, with a single source of data collection. No more individual applications for each group.
2. Every employee (2,500), and every computer (1,000) that had anything to do with evidence would need to have access to the system. And the Boston PD wasn’t the only agency that needed access to its evidence collections. Court officials and the district attorney’s office also touched evidence. In all, over 3,000 users required access — often simultaneously.
3. There would have to be, of course, limitations to each person’s access, with the tracking system shielding out those whose jobs didn’t require certain functions. There was sensitive data for each group that had to be kept private. By the time Tracker Products was done, there were over 600 data fields, each customized for the individual groups.
4. Tracker Products also had to merge data from many sources to compile one database system. Those systems would total over 20 products. In the end close to a half million records and several million custody transactions were imported. These figures do not include the many sources of supplemental data which were too numerous to count.
5. Tracker Products also needed to create a communication link between its software and the BPD incident tracking system. This would allow incident and person information to be provided to the evidence tracking system.
6. The company would need to create a communication link between its software and the PeopleSoft database that managed the thousands of users within Boston various departments.
7. Boston PD commanders would need immediate access to information about any item at any office. Such access might include a simple report, a rudimentary search or an advanced search of all data.
8. Users outside the police department (courts and DA) would also need access to the most up-to-date status of every piece of evidence.
9. The conversion to a new system would need to take place over a weekend (Friday, Saturday and Sunday) and new system up and running on Monday.
10. And finally, more than 3,000 users would need to be trained to use the system.

The Tracker’s browser-based environment was a primary feature of the implementation. Administrating a product used by thousands of people would be much easier when there was nothing to install on each client computer. Each system would use Internet Explorer as the primary interface. Easy enough. Users would then access the system through a link in the BPD portal application. All users would first authenticate with the BPD portal and then access the evidence system using a link on that site. One additional feature that sets Tracker Products software apart from its competitors was the ability to remove the required evidence log-in and use the portal authentication to validate a user. As BPD users would come and go, restricting access via the portal would have the same effect on the evidence system.

Tracker system designers spent countless hours with each department of the BPD to create a list of desired data fields to bring in to the application. In eliminating the need for any additional software for tracking of item information or results, Tracker Products needed to have the tracking application collect any desired data. A standard feature of the company’s software is the ability to create an unlimited number of custom fields in the system. For some smaller police departments employing Tracker Products’ software, that number would be relatively small. The Boston PD would need over 600 custom fields.

Another key feature of the Tracker Products application is the ability to import data from all the current sources into one database. Tracker designers collected all the necessary data, created flow charts and a process for import. Six weeks prior to implementation a test run was completed so that BPD users could review the data for accuracy. Three days prior to the official Monday rollout, Tracker received final copies of all data. The import was planned so well BPD users were testing the final system first thing Saturday morning. Several minor updates were required and easily implemented.

If designing and installing the software was easy enough for Tracker Products, training all 3,000 users on the proper use of the system was a far bigger task. Boston opted for a “train the trainer” method, in which Tracker Products representatives sat down with 100 of the most important users and walked them through the application.

With an install of this size, the desired results don’t always come easy. One would expect a few problems to surface when faced with a situation where hundreds of users begin working on an application simultaneously. But in Boston, because of Tracker software’s ease-of-use and comprehensive pre-install training, those potential problems were mostly averted. If not for some network and printer issues with pre-existing equipment there would have been no problems at all. At weeks end, all of the trained users were running the system and all of the desired information was being recorded to the system. The post-install meeting yielded only minor modifications. No major problems were reported.

Their work is now more efficient, more productive and far more user-friendly than ever before.

And with that, the folks at Tracker Products made one final command decision: They decided to catch a Red Sox game at Fenway Park.