D.C. Metropolitan Police Department Decreased Report Writing Time by 80%
The Challenge
The Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) employs over 3,700 sworn officers and coordinates activities with 40+ other law enforcement agencies in the nation’s capital. When Chief Cathy Lanier assumed leadership of MPD in 2007, police reports were still written by hand. Chief Lanier quickly made strides to transform MPD into a technology-savvy police force and increase collaboration with neighboring agencies. When evaluating alternatives to their existing Intergraph RMS in 2013, MPD realized the age and inefficiency of typical report writing software would hinder these efforts.
The Solution
Chief Lanier and the MPD Command Staff decided to work with the team at Mark43 to build a new, reimagined records management system (RMS) for D.C’s law enforcement agencies, from the ground up. The resulting software platform, Mark43 RMS, addressed the common pain points of patrol officers, detectives, records clerks, and IT system administrators in order to streamline paper-heavy processes, reduce repetitive data entry, and eliminate reporting error.
The Results
Mark43 RMS launched at MPD and 40+ other D.C. agencies in August 2015. From early system development to post-launch operations, Mark43 RMS outperformed MPD’s legacy system in the following ways:
IMPLEMENTATION & TRAINING
To ensure data quality for future analysis, Mark43’s technical services team migrated 10+ years of historical arrest, offense, and incident data to Mark43 RMS, and developed 20 custom third-party integrations for real-time information sharing. Officers adapted to the new, intuitive workflows with ease — training courses hosted at district stations took half a shift or less, and over 10,000 sworn officers were fully trained in just five and a half weeks.
“I just want to thank you for making my life so much easier. With Mark43 RMS, I can spend more time on the streets assisting my fellow officers.”
Officer, Metropolitan Police Department
USER APPROVAL
Department users overwhelmingly rated Mark43 RMS higher than their legacy system on system usability, performance, and effectiveness. When asked how likely they are to recommend Mark43 RMS to another officer on a 10 point scale, Mark43 scored a median 9 out of 10.
50%
Reduction in arrest report writing time
80%
Reduction in incident/offense report writing time
238K
Hours saved per year on report writing
110+
Officers effectively added to patrol
