When law enforcement agencies require that their officers come into the office for briefings and training, not only does it take them away from doing important police work, it often costs the agency overtime pay.
Maricopa Police Department doesn’t have this problem. They use PowerDMS and electronically share video messages and training that officers can watch while on their shift from any computer or mobile device. By keeping officers where they need to be, they save money and spend more time serving the community.
Fox 10 News-Phoenix recently broadcast live from Maricopa PD to show how they use PowerDMS and how it has benefitted the agency in many ways.
Transcript
Male Anchor: The Maricopa Police Department has some new tech to train its officers.
Female Anchor: Yeah, and address police accountability. Anita Roman is live this morning in Maricopa to check out their new system.
Reporter: Hey, good morning yeah the police department here at the city of Maricopa is really high tech. This is pretty interesting. They’ve been doing this for a couple of years but every single week really – monthly – and they’re updating the system. I want to introduce you to Tim Gomez. He’s an administrative assistant? Correct? To the Chief of Police. And it was a couple of years ago that you said ‘hey chief we need to go high tech. We need to make some changes. So tell us about those changes.
Tim Gomez: Yeah, so we purchased PowerDMS, a cloud based document management system. It houses all of our policies, our forms, our training and our accreditation our CALEA accreditation. Right now we are the only agency in the county of Pinal and our officers are logging on to PowerDMS every shift to see any new items that the chief of police might send out.
Reporter: OK guys so that basically means no handbooks when the officers start or if there’s a new policy change or the officers are out on patrol and they make a stop and they have a question about how they’re supposed to take care of a certain call or what the procedure is. They could just get right into this cloud basically is what we call it and look up all that information.
Tim Gomez: Yeah, they could log onto PowerDMS from their mobile computers, their cell phone or anywhere that they have internet access.
Reporter: Take us through it cause we were able to earlier catch up an officer who said beginning of every shift he logs in so I think you guys have been looking at video – ah – but this is what it looks like.
Tim Gomez: So this is a dashboard. When they log in they see immediately what they have to do and any policies they have to sign, approve, any videos that we have to send out. We have Brief with the Chief. So it’s a message he sends to all the officers.
Reporter: So you just hit play on that?
Tim Gomez: Yeah you just hit play.
Reporter: So instead of doing a ton of meetings and stuff this is the message.
Tim Gomez: Correct, yeah we send it out and it’s imbedded in here and they can view it when they’re on the road so they don’t have to come in and use time off the road.
Reporter: And so I asked the police officer what he thought. He’d been with the department for nine years. This started about two years ago and he said he really liked it. Very efficient. You think that most of the officers really are able to get more information with this type of system?
Tim Gomez: Yeah, I think they can get more information, it’s more efficient because they don’t have to come in off the road and sit in extended briefing or sit at the computers.
Reporter: And the City of Maricopa Police Department is one of the only mentioned in the state that does this?
Tim Gomez: Right now a lot of agencies are adopting it but we are the only one that uses the full suite.
Reporter: Alright so that’s it you guys. If you think about it it really makes sense so they’re just able to hit the street, they start their patrol and like Tim said they don’t have to go to a meeting, they don’t have to stop and read and they don’t have to come in and do stuff they’re just really able to do stuff right away even on their phones, on computers inside the car so the wave of the future right?
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