Page 369 - NIXBOOK

And of course due to high security issues mandated by state and federal bureaus of governmental inefficiency, each one of the
programs required their own different logins and passwords and most of the passwords had to be reset annually – or quarterly
– and yes those passwords required numbers and letters and special characters and had to be at least 8 characters long and old
passwords could never be used again and some of them even refused to let us use our badge numbers in there anywhere, just to
be extra godamn difficult.
As a consequence, very few officers used every single program or database available to them. I’d also like to add that I never, not
once, used a police-related database or report-writing program that was anywhere close to perfect. They all had their flaws; some
much worse than others. I don’t think any were created by real, experienced patrol officers, and most of them had shitty GUI’s.
A typical big police report might require up to a half dozen (or more) different programs to complete. Because none of them
were connected to each other. There would be one system for the main report, another for the evidence database, another one
for the bodycam recordings, another program to access previous DMV driver abstracts, another program to issue a ticket, and
another program to access the 911-dispatch notes. If a tow truck impounded a vehicle or a traffic collision report was needed,
that was another program. If there was a Use of Force that needed to be documented, that was another form. And DUI reports,
domestic violence reports, and traffic collisions had their very own special forms.

Believe it or not, there is no national or state standards for most of the software programs used by law enforcement. So there
are hundreds of different programs and standards used by thousands of different agencies and departments in this country.
Maybe someday the best systems will rise to the top and everything will be interconnected and data entry will become much
easier for future cops.

When I first started my career back in 1993, my department had two computer terminals used to type our police reports and
that was it. Everything else was old-school analog, like traffic tickets that were written by hand in triplicate forms. (“Press hard
you’re making copies”) Our computers and printers looked like this:

That printer: what it lacked in speed, it made up for in noise. Go to YouTube and look up “dot matrix printer” to get a full
appreciation. For better or worse, that first computer system was a casualty of Y2K; we lost our entire database in the transition
to a new program.