Introduction
PolicyTech™ Policy & Procedure Manager was the perfect solution for a group of everyday heroes in a growing community: the local Police Department.
Challenge
The Milford Police Department was founded in 1915 with six officers to protect and serve the town of Milford, Connecticut. Since then, the Milford Police Department has grown to approximately 150 employees and volunteers in over 10 divisions, all of whom need to know varying policies and procedures for their respective responsibilities. These policies and procedures are vital to keeping the community and the police department physically, intellectually, and legally sound.
The challenges that faced the Police Department included the need to:
- Track changing policies, and maintain rescinded versions of each policy to account for Police action taken at the time of individual cases
- Become a State Accredited Police Department by meeting legal requirements to update current policies and the employee manual
- Streamline a cumbersome policy creation, maintenance, and location process
- Legally protect themselves by ensuring each employee and volunteer had read and understood certain policies
- Alleviate the liability of maintaining policies on paper, in binders and file cabinets
- Implement a solution as quickly and painlessly as possible, which allowed employees to focus on valiantly protecting and serving their community.
Solution
PolicyTech™ Policy & Procedure Manager.
Result
The Milford Police Department indicates that switching to PolicyTech™ Policy & Procedure Manager has:
- Been a positive improvement to our organization
- Helped us organize our policies and made it easier for our employees to reference the policies when necessary
- Been used daily in referencing many policy procedures in law enforcement
- More than paid for the investment
When asked if the Milford Police Department would recommend this solution to other organizations, they responded with resolve:
"Absolutely!"
Details
Policy Technologies International Inc. (PolicyTech™) develops and provides web-based software that manages company policies and procedures in a convenient, reliable way. PolicyTech™ software has become the policy management software of choice for over 400 companies in a variety of industries including government, health care, education, financial and non-profit organizations. With a renewed slate of recent government regulations and with corporate responsibility at an all time high, PolicyTech™ policy management software is the solution for quality assurance and best practices enforcement and tracking.
The Milford Police Department provides policing services to the City of Milford, Connecticut (Population Approx. 53,000). Policing services that are provided by the Milford Police Department include an administrative division, crime prevention unit, identification bureau, investigative services, marine patrol/dive team, narcotics and vice squad, patrol, special response team (SRT), State certified Training Academy, traffic services, and a youth bureau. Each sub-division has it's own policies and procedures that must be maintained to ensure State accreditation.
Approximately 150 employees and volunteers that work with the Milford Police need to stay current with ever changing policies and regulations. The previous method for tracking and distributing these changes consisted of paper policies and bulky folders. The method proved to be inefficient and unproductive for tracking the changes that were made and remembering who had viewed and read the appropriate policies. Archiving the old policies was cumbersome, and proved to be a critical feature requirement for a new solution.
The Milford Police Department began searching for a good solution to handle the department policy management more effectively and quickly. Sgt. Dan Bothwell states the department solution requirements: "We wanted to update our current policies and employee manual and become a State Accredited Police Department in the process. We needed a program that would enable us to create, maintain, and locate policies easily and quickly. We also needed for our employees to be able to easily access and read the policies and to confirm that our employees have read the policies. In addition we have a unique need to track all the changes made to our policies over the years and maintain copies of the old versions and rescinded policies."
After a fair comparison of several viable database and software solutions, PolicyTech™ was chosen as the best fit for the Police Department requirements. One major benefit provided by PolicyTech™ was "The ability to track if polices have been read and the ability to archive old policies. The archive feature is extremely important to Police organizations as Officers are often summoned to appear in court and required to bring a Department Policy regarding some action the Officer took if reference to case in question. This can happen years after the fact and sometimes the Policy in question has undergone multiple revisions or even been completely rescinded. Therefore the archive feature and the ability to search the archive is of monumental importance to this field of work." (Sgt. Dan Bothwell)
Sgt. Bothwell describes the outcome of choosing PolicyTech™ as "a positive improvement to our organization as it has helped us organize our policies and made it easier for our employees to reference them when needed…it is used daily in referencing many policy procedures in law enforcement…the investment has more than paid for itself."
When asked if Sgt. Bothwell and the Milford Police Department would recommend this solution to other organizations, he responded with resolve:
"Absolutely!"
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