“It takes new police officers a very short time to realize that
the worst part of the job is all of the paperwork. Some incidents
require three or four reports to complete, most having the same
information, all with a narrative. When I first started, officers
were expected to type multi-part forms or handwrite them with no
mistakes. My first thought when I encountered this mountain of
paperwork was how much easier this would be with a computer. When I
came on the force in 1994 there were no computers available to
officers for everyday use, and anyone who brought in their own was
looked down on.“One day I couldn’t take it anymore. I found some old 8086
machines, monochrome monitors, and dot-matrix printers that were
being used as doorstops. When I brought them in I got some very
strange looks. I found an old DOS program to print onto multi-part
forms and worked on my time off configuring the software…”
Web Webster has more than 20 years of writing and editorial experience in the tech sector. He’s written and edited news, demand generation, user-focused, and thought leadership content for business software solutions, consumer tech, and Linux Today, he edits and writes for a portfolio of tech industry news and analysis websites including webopedia.com, and DatabaseJournal.com.
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