Integrating Police Misconduct Tracking with Your Case Management System

If your public defense office already uses case management software, you have a powerful foundation for tracking police misconduct that's often overlooked. By leveraging your existing system, you can start tracking officer information in your secure, familiar environment. 

This approach works only if your office already has a customizable case management system and can't yet procure a purpose-built tool like Techtivist. Otherwise, we don’t recommend intertwining the two. 

Advantages and Disadvantages of Case Management Integration

Pros:

• Familiar environment: Staff already trained on the system

• Secure infrastructure: Meets your confidentiality requirements

• Automatic backups: Usually included in case management systems

• No Procurement Process: You don't have to wait to contract another tool

Limitations to Consider:

• Not purpose-designed: Designed for case management, not misconduct analysis. Reusing another system outside of it's intended scope will always run into road blocks of functionality

• No external collaboration: Can't share data with other defender offices or import from other systems

• Difficult to Change: The priority of the system is to track cases. Any conversions for misconduct tracking will take a back seat

• Vendor dependency: Reliant on software provider for capabilities, updates and support

• Limited trend analysis: Difficult to identify patterns across officers, units, cases and time periods

• Restricted field options: Limited by case management system capabilities

• Search functionality: May not be optimized for misconduct-specific queries

• Scalability issues: Performance may degrade with large amounts of officer data

If working with your case management system still seems like the best option, here's how we recommend you get started.

When This Approach Works Best

Ideal for offices that:

• Have robust case management systems with customization options

• Primarily need officer information tied to specific cases

• Don't plan to collaborate extensively with external organizations

• Have staff comfortable with system administration

• Want to maximize existing software investments

Less suitable for offices that:

• Need comprehensive trend analysis across multiple jurisdictions

• Want to share data with other defender offices

• Receive a lot of officer records

• Require specialized misconduct tracking features

• Have limited case management system flexibility

Step 1: Assess Your System's Flexibility

Understanding Your Current System's Capabilities

Your case management system must allow you to:

• Create custom fields for additional data

• Add contacts beyond clients (including officers)

• Attach documents to contacts

• Search and view contact profiles

• Allow staff to upload and edit data

Questions to Ask:

• Can you create custom contact or people types (like "Law Enforcement Officer")?

• Are custom fields available for contacts?

• Can you attach documents to officer contacts?

• Does the system allow tagging or categorization?

• Who is allowed to import and edit data?

• Are there reporting features for custom data?

• Can you export data for analysis?

Step 2: Design Your Officer Tracking Structure

While we can’t provide specific advice without knowing the capabilities of your case management system, we recommend taking a similar approach as described in [Blog post 2 - spreadsheet] where you maintain a single contact list of officers and link misconduct data related to them. 

Set up "Law Enforcement Officer" as a distinct contact category, separate from clients, opposing counsel, or court personnel.

Some fields you might want to track:

• Unique Identifier - it’s important to have a way to uniquely identify officers. Officers may have license numbers in your state that you can request (check with POST agency) or the National Police Index. We can't overemphasize the need to keep your list of officers clean and know who is who.

• Officer First Name

• Officer Middle Name

• Officer Last Name

• Badge Number

• Previous Badge Numbers (comma-separated)

• Department (use consistent! name)

• Agency Start Date (when the office first began working at the agency)

• Status (Active/Inactive/Retired)

  
  

*See our blog post here for other recommended Data to Track.

Data Entry Consistency:

• Assign ownership: Designate specific staff for officer data maintenance

• Create templates: Standardized forms for new officer entries

• Regular training: Ensure all staff understand the system

• Quality control: Monthly reviews to catch errors and duplicates

• Knowledge transfer: Document institutional knowledge 

Upgrade Path

As your misconduct tracking needs grow, you may find case management integration insufficient. Signs it's time to consider dedicated solutions like Notion/Airtable or Techtivist:

• Analysis limitations: Need better trend identification and reporting

• Collaboration requirements: Want to share data with other offices or import it from other sources

• Comprehensive profiles: Need complete officer histories beyond your cases

• Specialized features: Require alerts, bulk importing, and summarized data

• Time efficiency: Spending too much time on data management vs. legal work

Remember, this approach leverages tools you already have so it has limitations compared to specialized solutions.  We recommend this only for offices unable to make the investment into more specialized software. 

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Ready to take your misconduct tracking to the next level?

Contact Techtivist at info@techtivist.com or book a call here to learn how our platform can amplify your office's impact and connect you with a network of defenders driving systemic change.