In 2000, the City of Dallas was facing a $30 million budget shortfall for the 2000-2001 fiscal year. At that time, the First Assistant City Manager pulled together an Efficiency Team (E-Team) to work with a national consultant in order to find areas where inefficient operations were costing the city money.
E-Team representatives from the Dallas Police Department identified approximately $4.2 million in funds that were being allocated to Court overtime. Furthermore, the paper-based subpoena notification process was draining manpower and resources for both the Police Department and the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office.
A business process review of the legacy system revealed numerous manual steps that started with the DA Investigator or Prosecutor filling out a paper routing slip, making multiple copies, and then placing it in a mail sorter. Twice a day Dallas PD would send personnel by vehicle to the County Courthouse to retrieve the paper documents, then return and manually enter the subpoenas into the mainframe. The subpoenas would subsequently be routed to the agency divisions by printing to dedicated line printers at the substations.
From there administrative personnel would cut the notifications into strips, hand log them into a book, and officers would be called up during briefings to sign for their subpoenas. If it was an imminent notification, officers might not receive their subpoena to appear until after the case had been heard. And due to the manual complexities, officers would sometimes miss their notices and thus their court dates.
Officers that had multiple court appearances would have to go to every court upon arrival and sign into a notebook in each courtroom. The Dallas PD subpoena unit personnel would travel to the courthouse and manually audit the sign-in logs. There were no checks and balances to determine what time an officer actually arrived and departed from court. Plus, there was no management of how an officer’s time was being used at the courthouse -- if they actually testified or the percentage of overtime that was consumed by any particular court.
After recognizing the potential efficiencies that could be gained from an electronic subpoena notification system, members of the E-Team looked to the marketplace. The product that was selected was the Orion Communications CourtNotify solution. As a Public Safety software provider, Orion offered a comprehensive product designed to solve all aspects of subpoena management and coordination.
“What we wanted first and foremost was a better method of accountability, not only for court attendance, but for managing court overtime,” states Lieutenant Summers with the Dallas Police Department. “We wanted a consolidated solution for the District Attorney and an easy-to-use application for our officers. The electronic notification was one piece, but the tracking of court attendance electronically was equally important to cost containment.”
“From an IT standpoint, we didn’t want a huge, complicated system to maintain, nor did we want to spend a lot on infrastructure,” states Mr. Tommy Hutson, IT Administrator for the Dallas County District Attorney. “We also wanted a system that issued electronic subpoenas to the Dallas PD, as well as the other 26 law enforcement agencies throughout the County. With CourtNotify, we were able to accomplish both of those goals. We had 8,800 sworn officers throughout Dallas County at the time. The ability to get 27 agencies and 8,800+ officers all on the same system using electronic notifications has increased our court productivity and efficiency tremendously.”
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