Successes - Dallas Police Department
To Catch a Thief: Fortis Audit Trail Provides the Clues

Westbrook’s Fortis document management software has been an integral part of the Dallas Police Department’s (DPD) technology infrastructure since 2001.The software enables the DPD to better manage the documents and data that not only help them run a more efficient organization, but also contribute to tracking and preventing criminal activity. Fortis is used in the Records Section, the Police Technology and Property units, and the Personnel and Internal Affairs divisions. It recently played a part in an internal investigation of an illegal distribution of accident reports.

Accident reports, which are part of the public record, are archived in the Fortis repository, and released to the public upon request. The reports are purchased by individuals involved in an accident and by companies that offer services that an accident victim might need such as insurance, legal services, medical care and rental cars. Representatives from one of these companies noticed that when they placed new business calls, some potential clients had already been contacted by another firm before the public release of the accident report.

Detective Ed Matis, one of the investigating officers on the case, approached Fortis Administrator Irene Arista to find out how the accident reports were archived and retrieved by Fortis. “I asked her if we could track abnormalities to see if anyone was printing large volumes of documents. That’s when she started using Fortis to identify user profiles that looked suspicious.”

Arista turned to Joel Crayne, a systems engineer from IKON Office Solutions, to learn more about the Fortis Audit Trail. He showed Arista how to configure the Audit Trail to assist in the investigation. “I was able to create queries for the Records Unit. Then I drilled down to see the histories of the accident reports – by user, date and report number,” Arista says.

Detective Matis requested copies of the accident reports that had allegedly been released prematurely to use as markers. Arista took the data that showed who accessed and printed these reports and put it into an Excel® spreadsheet that displayed usage patterns. “We would then take a look at those markers and say, ‘OK let’s look at this person or that person, and see if they could possibly be involved,’’’ Matis says. “Then Irene could match each user with the volume of accident reports that they were viewing and printing. That’s how we narrowed down the scope of our investigation.”

Because of the Fortis Audit Trail, Detective Matis and his team were able to clear the members of the Records Section. “Irene pointed us in the right direction. Ultimately, we found the source who was releasing the documents illegally. The Fortis Audit Trail is another tool that helped us as investigators.”

“Irene was able to take the data from Fortis and export it into Excel putting it into terms that made it logical for us to review. That will ultimately support Ed’s case when it goes to court,” says Lt. Scott Gerdes of the Police Technology Unit. “It will be a lot easier for a jury to understand the sequence of events.”

The Fortis Audit Trail was also helpful when the DPD was working with the District Attorney’s Office to determine which charges could be filed in the case. “Some of our laws weren’t matching up with the specifics of the crime,” Matis explains. “The capabilities of the technology exceeded what had been accounted for by our legal system. By using the Fortis Audit Trail, we were able to confirm that the subject who we arrested had printed more than 25,000 reports over a three-year period. These reports are valued at over $152,000.”

Why is Fortis such a good fit for a law enforcement environment? “The Audit Trail and the ability to build customized queries easily came in very handy in this investigation,” Arista says. “There was a time when we were looking hard at people in our own department. This tool helped exonerate people as well as pointing to the guilty party who was misusing the Fortis software. It was easy for me to run queries and extract that data into Excel to further manipulate it to create the reports for Ed.”

Fortis Software throughout the DPD
When the DPD chose Fortis, the software’s indexing capabilities, full- text search and the potential for saving file space were among the main selling points. “At that point no one thought about the potential uses of its Audit Trail capabilities,” Gerdes says.

The Records Section has been the most extensive Fortis user. Section staff scans accident reports, police reports, open records requests and other documents into Fortis. Fortis makes it easy to retrieve and print accident reports and case file documents.

Prior to using Fortis, clerks needed three identifying factors, such as date, location and the names of the parties involved, in order to retrieve an accident report. Now a report can be retrieved with only one identifying characteristic, improving the speed of service to the public. The accident reports are also accessed by the Traffic and Legal divisions and by a traffic engineer at city hall. Three to four hundred accident reports are scanned into Fortis every week. There are 193,000 reports in the Fortis repository, which Irene Arista describes as the “virtual backbone of our records group.”

The DPD also receives more than 6,000 open records requests every year from members of the public and the media. It is labor-intensive to pull the hard copy of the case files and then photocopy them. DPD investigative units are beginning to scan case files into Fortis. If the case is already in the Fortis repository, an administrator can pull up the case records electronically and print out the requested information. If a case has not been scanned, the Open Records Unit scans in the requested file. A single case file is often requested by more than one interested party, so if someone else requests the documents it is easy to print another copy from Fortis.

In the Police Technology Unit, Fortis is used to scan all documents related to procurement, security access reports, correspondence and memos. “When there’s a question about how much has been spent under a certain grant and what was purchased we find the information easily,” Arista says.

With Fortis CD Express™, officers can present case information archived in Fortis in court. “They bring a laptop into court, pop in a CD and have the documents at hand without having to lug around boxes of photocopied reports,” Arista says.

As more investigative units begin to scan in case files, the potential for space savings is considerable. “We archive all of our documents for a certain length of time depending on what the criminal statutes require. Records from some capital crimes are kept indefinitely. Our Archive Unit was running out of space,” Lt. Gerdes says.

Arista will be integrating Polaris (accident reporting and drawing software), with Fortis. “When an electronically generated report comes in from Polaris, Fortis Data Entry Assistant™ will automatically fill in the index fields and archive the Polaris report and drawings,” she says.

The Internal Affairs Division has been using Fortis for more than a year and other departments are asking to come on board.

In the future, the Property Unit, which keeps track of more than 100,000 pieces of seized property, will scan their records into Fortis. The Personnel Division plans to use Fortis to scan in background checks, safety records and other documents.

>> Click here for printable PDF