Even if your local campus stayed quiet, the massive wave of unrest that seized U.S. colleges and universities in the spring of 2024 was a sentinel event. Students and activists occupied buildings and common areas, vandalism proliferated, and some clashes turned violent, posing complex challenges to campus cops faced with protecting students’ rights, speakers’ rights, public safety and public property all at once. In these tense political times, it’s not hard to imagine such events occurring again.
University police and security personnel, then, need the resources to manage not only everyday operations but occasional protests and other disruptive events comprehensively and efficiently – resources just as capable as those used by their counterparts in city police and county sheriffs’ departments. As an established provider of computer-aided dispatch (CAD) and records management systems (RMS) to law enforcement organizations in New Jersey, Enforsys knows a good bit about those needs – and its PoliSys 4.0 Cloud Campus Edition software is an effective way to meet them for schools and similar institutions within the state and anywhere else.
“If you have a regular police department on campus, it provides everything – CAD, dispatching, record keeping and report writing,” said Monica Laielli, Enforsys’ director of operations. “The big difference with universities is that they also have to do Clery reporting, and that’s also very accessible and easy in our system.”
Clery reporting – mandated by a 1990 law named for murdered Lehigh University student Jeanne Clery – requires secondary education institutions that participate in federal financial aid programs to track and report information about crime on and around their campuses to the federal government. Support for that is just one of the attributes the PoliSys 4.0 Cloud Campus Edition, currently used by multiple institutions of higher learning, offers.
CLOUD IMPROVES SAFETY, REACH
Another big one – the one that enables it to serve campuses everywhere – is its residence in the cloud. “That’s what lets us offer the platform nationwide,” said Enforsys CEO Gerard Britton.
Cloud storage means easy access and management for users anywhere, with no need for local servers and IT support. Microsoft’s Azure Government cloud, designed for mission-critical government use, provides the highest level of available security.
“Hardware is a big issue for a lot of departments, and maintaining the security of their network,” noted Laielli. “In today’s society you have to worry about getting hacked – many police departments already have been. So being in the Azure Government cloud basically ups the game where they don’t have to worry about that – we worry about it for them.”
That can be a major comfort. With on-prem systems, ransomware and other attacks on vital and compromising information may be only one errant click from a new file clerk away. The cloud, conversely, is less easily hacked. It also frees users from concerns about maintenance, access, upgrades and operating conditions.
“We probably have around 40 police customers in the cloud now, and they’ve been there for a number of years – that’s let us iron out any wrinkles,” added Britton.
Operationally, the PoliSys 4.0 Cloud Campus Edition’s CAD function provides easy oversight of responses, units and call information, plus configurable management of common procedures. Its RMS allows linkage to incidents, a library of fillable reports and customizable incident numbering. Beyond that, it offers full case management capabilities and supports extensive data reporting. Optional components include enhanced data dashboards and data sharing for departments that operate cooperatively.
“The reporting features are very easy to use,” said Laielli, who as Enforsys’ customer quality assurance director spent many years hearing users’ needs and pain points. “Input is very simple – once you know how to do one report in our system, you know how to do all of them.” Reports can be shared to one colleague or many, and electronic approvals help keep interactions timely.
The case management feature Laielli compares to a filing cabinet, where investigators can pull in information from original incidents, subsequent investigations and other sources and maintain everything electronically, rather than dealing with paper.
Beyond colleges and universities, the PoliSys 4.0 Cloud Campus Edition can be suitable for institutions like health care facilities, large businesses and other complex environments where security is a concern.
“If you want to have electronic record keeping for all your reports, where you’d just be able to search the names and vehicles you’ve contacted, you don’t necessarily have to use the dispatching portion of the system,” Laielli noted.
SYSTEM CAN SERVE DEPARTMENTS BOTH LARGE AND SMALL
But the PoliSys 4.0 system also scales up, and its full CAD/RMS product – a parent to the Cloud Campus Edition – can meet the range of needs of entire municipal police departments. In New Jersey it serves agencies as small as eight members and as large as Newark’s vast 1,300-member PD.
PoliSys 4.0 is a fully integrated multijurisdictional “decision support system” that includes core CAD, RMS and mobile computing functions and offers numerous additional modules, features and interfaces with top third-party solutions used by first responders. Among those interfaces are NCIC queries; notable brands of body-worn cameras; fingerprint and evidence-management systems; EMS and fire platforms; dashboard, analytics and mapping solutions, including shot detection; and eticketing and accident-reporting products.
One important module supports internal affairs such as departments’ random drug testing programs. In New Jersey those requirements are substantial: A 2023 change in the law now requires testing of both law enforcement applicants and academy trainees and permits random testing of officers. The drug testing module is part of the independent cloud-based internal affairs solution provided by Enforsys.
Similarly, an integrated resident portal supports nonemergency requests and complaints from citizens.
“If you’re a resident and something happens that doesn’t rise to the level of calling 911 but you want somebody to look at it – your neighbor’s playing music too loud, or there are stray cats all over – you can go online and submit it,” said Britton. The same portal can handle requests for overnight parking permits in jurisdictions that restrict it. “Nobody has to get on the phone for any of that,” added Britton. “It’s all done from your computer.”
The resident portal is also a feature available with the campus edition.
A new benefit for departments both large and small will allow the controlled sharing of data with other PoliSys departments. Those that opt in will be able to get CAD and record information from each other – so if you have a name or address, you can run it not only within your department, but also through other participants to see what might pop up.
“I’m in a small town up toward the top of New Jersey, and we get people here all the time from large cities,” said David Dolan, a project manager for Enforsys and full-time public safety telecommunicator. “When we run into them on a call, we’ll be able to learn a bit more and hopefully get a good picture of who this person is.”
It’s worth noting, Dolan adds, that neighboring jurisdictions need not purchase separate PoliSys systems and enable data sharing – a single system is perfectly capable of serving multiple police departments as well as other public safety disciplines like fire and EMS.
The PoliSys platform also includes a special needs registry. This can identify anything from seniors with dementia to homes with aggressive dogs. It allows departments to flag individuals independently of their addresses, in case they’re encountered elsewhere.
Other attributes of the PoliSys 4.0 platform include CAD mapping and call history, an extensive library of fillable reports, enhanced capabilities for exporting, analyzing and visualizing data, and access from any device and location.
WORK SMARTER
That all makes for a highly capable system, but more is coming. The first department has begun using a new feature that encompasses the kinds of alternative responses to nonthreatening, low-priority mental health-type calls that many cities are now exploring – e.g., sending a paramedic and a social worker rather than police. “We were on top of that early and did some testing with different departments,” said Britton. Other enhancements continue.
Enforsys notes the important role of law enforcement professionals in developing its products, and with the PoliSys system one aspect of that is simplified compliance with NIBRS reporting. NIBRS, the National Incident-Based Reporting System, is the data standard used by the federal government’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program.
That standard was toughened a few years back, and Enforsys’ platform supports that NIBRS demand for more data. “By the estimate of our state police, we did the best job of creating the interface and platform for that,” noted Britton. PoliSys offers a NIBRS service element that helps users get their data reported accurately and on time.
The company also provides a robust service arm that – in the rare event something goes wrong – can troubleshoot problems and get them fixed quickly.
“We have 24-hour seven-day-a-week support with live people, and we listen to our customers,” added Laielli. “If they have a question or a suggestion to improve the system and make things easier, we want to hear it. We want people to work smarter, not harder. Being in law enforcement today is already hard – we want to make their jobs easier.”
For more information, visit Enforsys.
