Each agency is different and unique in the communities they serve, yet each agency wants the best public safety software from a leading public safety software company to help provide services efficiently and safely. SoundThinking, formerly ShotSpotter, provides an array of products to support and enhance safety. With excellent customer service and product support, SoundThinking’s focus on helping their customers make sound decisions to keep their communities safe. SoundThinking’s rich history in public safety, industry experience, and strong customer success team works with our customers to help them achieve their desired outcomes with our products.
SoundThinking’s safety cornerstone provides understanding of the public safety industry. The availability of current and future funds is also a top consideration for law enforcement agencies looking to leverage technology. SoundThinking understands the funding component is often primary for agencies of all sizes and requires balancing the overall department needs while managing public safety. Making decisions about technology purchases involves balancing the available funding with the command staff’s need for tools to support and improve their law enforcement efforts and public safety operations, and the IT staff’s wish for solutions that will be reasonably easy to install and maintain.
Benefits of Public Safety Software
With concerns about staffing and retention, law enforcement agencies find themselves looking for software and systems to improve outdated processes and technology that require more staff time to gather and compile data manually. Hotspot maps are clumsy (and often outdated) ways to direct patrols and don’t provide a way to measure results. With limited staff, taking time to compile hotspot maps and similar forms of resource management, may be time better spent on other tasks.
Using spreadsheets to track leads and evidence in investigations is laborious, as are records management systems that do not share information with other agencies may find themselves using patrol time to collect data. Without comprehensive reporting features for every step of the investigative process, agencies are at risk of increased criticism for their lack of transparency.
The SafetySmart™ platform from SoundThinking addresses all these concerns. Not only do CrimeTracer™, CaseBuilder™, and ResourceRouter™ solutions give agencies the tools they need to make the most of their personnel and budgets while providing up-to-date technology that’s reliable and easy to use, this suite of products can also be combined with ShotSpotter for even more investigative success, deter crime and improved community safety.
CrimeTracer + CaseBuilder for Effective Crime Investigations
One component of the SafetySmart platform is CrimeTracer, a law enforcement data management system and lead-generating search engine. The solution allows officers to use natural-language search terms to quickly and easily find information and links about any situation or people or vehicles they encounter.
CrimeTracer provides access to more than a billion records from local law enforcement and nearby jurisdictions as well as from RMS, CAD (it comes with over 150 packaged connectors to biggest CAD/RMS vendors), LPRs, LinX, (N-DEx), the Thomson Reuters CLEAR database of public records, and more. It consolidates the information from all these and other sources into one centralized dashboard that includes links to original data sources and specific reports in a certain city or state, and can generate charts of connections it uncovers.
CrimeTracer in Action
That quick and easy access to information helps officers strike the right balance between crime reduction, community engagement, and personal safety. For example, let’s say an officer gets a description from a witness to a gun crime; they can find matches based on everything from name and aliases to known addresses, known associates, and more. Democratizing that ability removes the dependency on crime analysts to uncover such .
The records searched aren’t just your local records, either. Since it draws from and shares info with multiped agencies and jurisdictions, CrimeTracer enhances collaboration. Cobb County, GA, noted in the above video, was struggling with linking multiple databases to track suspects, witnesses, and so on. “It was extremely cumbersome,” says their Chief of Police Stuart VanHoozer. “With CrimeTracer, we were able to simplify that search. We’ve been able to link suspects, or even identify suspects, by getting data from other agencies.”
CrimeTracer accesses more than 1.3 billion records to build out a profile of a person of interest.
In addition to the searching and cross-referencing features, CrimeTracer seamlessly integrates with another of the SafetySmart solutions, CaseBuilder. CaseBuilder is case management software that creates a digital folder for collecting documents, witness statements, citizen tips, CCTV videos, and more information related to a case. CrimeTracer can initiate searches on items contained in a CaseBuilder folder, and add leads and connections to a case as they’re uncovered.
CaseBuilder Improves Investigation Management
CaseBuilder provides a holistic view of cases from the beginning through each step and phase along the way. In complex situations, the ability to track and organize the hundreds and hundreds of notes, evidence entries, supplemental reports, witness statements, photos, reports, and more, not only increases the solvability, but provides a clear investigatory path to show the charging authorities and courts.
A records management system (RMS) alone, will not provide the environment needed to track intricate investigations. The RMS may link individuals to individual incident records, but a case management system (CMS) like CaseBuilder, provides an integrated and complete view of investigations. It centralizes all case-related information making a complete case file to aid in prosecution.
Organize instantly – Case Dashboard in CaseBuilder.
In addition to the overall, complete view of the investigation during all stages, CaseBuilder provides tracking, workflow, and collaboration.
- Workflow management allows investigators to track each case’s progress from initiation to closure. Even when other investigators, forensic lab technicians, or other collaborators contribute items to the case, the lead investigator can see the updates as part of the overall view of the case.
- Data analysis and reporting in CaseBuilder provide the tools to analyze trends, patterns and correlations across cases. The ability to track crime sprees, criminal networks and other related cases improves decision-making, officer safety advice, and resource allocation.
- Collaborating among investigators and patrol officers, evidence custodians or lab technicians helps save the investigators time as the information is gathered electronically and stored in one place with the same case. Seamless information sharing leads to additional coordination and usually a higher clearance rate.
ResourceRouter
When it comes to dealing with the staffing shortages and budget restrictions that are affecting law enforcement everywhere, it’s critical that agencies use the tools in their toolboxes efficiently. The fourth leg of the SafetySmart platform, ResourceRouter, helps those agencies maximize the officers and analysts that are available.
Implementing proactive public safety initiatives by directing patrols to where they’ll likely be needed most, needs to consider multiple data points, both agency and community data. The previously standard approach of hotspot mapping is inefficient. requiring analysis of the crime data manually, so by the time the maps are prepared, they can often be out of date. Hotspot maps also don’t provide a way to track what actions were taken by responding officers or evaluate the outcomes.
With ResourceRouter, command staff can rely on data to plan patrols by the day or even by the shift. The plans are based on historic crime and non-crime data to predict what areas are the most likely to experience crime (color-coded as to crime type) and to automatically direct appropriate patrols to those areas. This data-driven, automatic process can result in an up to 80% time per week compared to generating hot spot maps.
The Patrol Management Toolbox
Worcester, Massachusetts uses ResourceRouter as part of its community-first approach to policing. “Today, in addition to responding to calls for service and engaging with the community and solving problems, there’s the added expectation that we’ll be able to use and leverage data to anticipate where and when crimes will occur to prevent them from happening in the first place,” says Worcester Police Department Principal Crime Analyst Tiana Antul. “I can tell you unequivocally that we would not be able to achieve what ResourceRouter allows us to do with directed patrols, with the resources that we have in terms of the number of analysts and time that that would require.”
Agencies also need an effective way to track what patrol officers are doing when they’re not responding to an active situation, and to manage them in their uncommitted time. This direction of patrols enables agencies to track the presence of their officers in designated areas, gain insight into their activities, assess metrics, and evolve best practices. And that in turn helps agencies do more than just address crime as it happens. It also gives command staff the information needed to work in partnership with other stakeholders to develop ways to prevent crime before it happens. In addition to the automated direction of patrols, ResourceRouter supports Ad Hoc patrols. They let command staff direct officers to areas that require special attention, whether because of a crime spree or an event.
With ResourceRouter, command staff gets a full picture of where officers are engaged on both directed patrols and in their uncommitted time.
Best Public Safety Software Company
In times of budget and staffing shortages, police chiefs and command staff need up-to-date tools to maximize the effectiveness of the officers and other resources at their disposal. At the same time, agency IT staff—also under staffing and budget pressure—need tools that are easy to use and that come with comprehensive support both before and after installation. Finding the best public safety software solution can improve decision-making at the command staff level and reduce staff hours needed to manage the data.
The SafetySmart Platform is one of the best public safety software solutions to enhance both officer and public safety, support community involvement, and help investigate and clear cases, all backed by 24/7 support. Managing patrol resources, handling investigations, and sharing data with other agencies allows your agency to serve the community, lessen the impact of data gathering on staff, increase transparency, and improve safety for public safety and the community. SoundThinking has a rich history in public safety and our experience in the industry and customer success team works with our customers to help them leverage our products. From policies to best practices, our customer success team not only shares their own experiences but those learned from other customers.
