Infoshare criminal records system a cost-saver

PRESS RELEASE
November 21, 2011
For Immediate Release
Contact: Bernie Weisenfeld- PIO

For most of the history of criminal investigations in Gloucester County and elsewhere, law enforcement has generated file cabinets of paper, originating with police departments, turned over to the county prosecutor’s office and then shared as required with defense attorneys.

But for the past three years, the paperwork involved in police reports, Miranda forms, photographs, hand-written witness statements and other records has been turned into digital documents- a computer transformation that the Gloucester County Prosecutor’s Office has been a state leader in accomplishing.

The traditional paper records flow “was labor-intensive and also expensive with respect to supplies,” said Gloucester County Prosecutor Sean F. Dalton.

Under what is called the Infoshare system, only the original criminal complaint signed at police departments is still required to be in paper form. “Everything else is sent electronically,” said Dalton. “And when something gets mislaid, we are easily able to retrieve it.”

The digitization program, including the purchasing of scanners and software for records administrators and laptops and training for all GCPO assistant prosecutors, was funded by a state Public Archives and Records Infrastructure Support (PARIS) grant included in New Jersey’s 2004-05 budget. The PARIS program was itself funded by a document filing fee collected by county clerks.

This was a project that our former First Assistant Prosecutor, Steve Sand, spearheaded with Jannan Salvati of the Prosecutor’s Office and Michelle Everly of the county Information technology Department,” said Dalton. “Their commitment was critical, especially when it came to teaching people a new way of doing their job, which is never easy.”

“I started with three major municipalities,” said Salvati, who manages Infoshare within the GCPO. “It was West Deptford, Mantua and Glassboro.”

“The scanners were all set up. I taught them how to do the scanning, everything they had to do to get the reports up to us. We stayed with that to work out all the bugs for probably about eight months. Then we slowly started adding new municipalities until about a year ago.”

Assisting the GCPO and other county prosecutor’s offices statewide was CSI Technology Group, of Keasbey NJ. The 20-year-old firm specializes in criminal investigation and prosecution technology. CSI support managers for South Jersey offices are James Mannion and Richard Norcross.

All 22 Gloucester County police departments- two have merged since the program began- and the Rowan University Security Department now transmit documents needed for prosecutions with the tap of a keyboard.

Today, “the only way reports come into our office is through the Infoshare system, saving the municipalities postage,” Salvati said. Previously, reports were mailed, hand-carried and sometimes faxed to the GCPO “if they weren’t too bulky,” she said.

When the PARIS program was initiated in 2005, then New Jersey Secretary of State Regina L. Thomas compared it to the state’s first records preservation law in 1760. PARIS represents “an advancement as important today as the construction of the first fireproof vaults to protect New Jersey’s colonial archives was nearly 250 years ago,” Thomas said in an article published by a Web site that reports developments in government technology.

Documents related to criminal cases must still be copied onto paper to be shared with defense attorneys in the pre-trial “discovery” process, but “the next phase is to put all the discovery onto a disc and send it out,” said Prosecutor Dalton.

GCPO assistant prosecutors appreciate the efficiency of the Infoshare system. While ushering in “an era of digitized discovery,” Infoshare eliminates the time-consuming steps of copying, packaging and mailing documents, said AP Joseph Brook, who prosecutes computer crimes.

“It has been said that justice delayed is justice denied,” said Brook. “The Infoshare system brings more immediacy and fights unnecessary delay as the Prosecutor’s Office continues its mission to administer justice for its constituency.”

On the document-generating side- the municipal police departments- Infoshare saves paper-transfer time that is better spent on the street, said West Deptford Chief Craig Mangano. “Even for the smallest of cases, there can be a considerable amount of documents,” said Chief Mangano. Infoshare “streamlines the process of document transfer for our criminal cases.”