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Best of COPSWest "Go Green Efforts" awarded to Tacoma, Wash., PD for use of LeadsOnline

Tacoma PD automated over 1.5 million paper tickets with LeadsOnline, save the Department 4,160 man hours per year

November 24, 2011

The Tacoma, Washington Police Department (TPD) implemented a bold plan to create a more sustainable and efficient method for businesses in their jurisdiction to report transactions for use in investigations involving property. Leading up to this, these secondhand dealers reported approximately 300,000 paper tickets to TPD, which had to be manually entered into the Department's systems to check for stolen property and other criminal activity. This process was not only a detriment to the environment, but it was also costly, requiring the attention of two detectives working full time, a combined 4,160 hours per year solely used for data entry of paper tickets. Because the manual entry of transaction data was always back logged by a minimum of three months, the paper tickets were of little value in crime solving. Detectives would have to visit each business individually to search for property pertaining to a pressing investigation.

Automating the collection process for transactions through the implementation of LeadsOnline, TPD has since eliminated all paper tickets, approximately 1.5 million, in their jurisdiction. Calculating that the average pine tree produces 80, 500 sheets of paper, this values the 1.5 million electronic transactions from Tacoma businesses at 18.6 trees saved in less than 5 years. The two detectives that were formerly in charge of manually entering the paper tickets are now working cases full time because LeadsOnline allows them to instantly (and paperlessly) search for suspects and stolen property from their computer. Working cases via LeadsOnline, TPD detectives are able to notify stores online if property needs to be placed on hold, eliminating unnecessary driving that often times took an entire day of driving around the city to visit each business.

While going completely green in their collection of paper tickets, TPD dramatically increased the number of cases cleared for crimes involving property theft.

"I don't think a week goes by where we aren't able to catch a burglar with LeadsOnline."

- Lt. Dave O'Dae

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