Settling for a faster, more efficient method of collaborating on criminal prosecutions instead of a flying car, Denver police and the district attorney’s office Friday launched a paperless electronic system expected to save about $1 million staff time and paperwork yearly.
Relying on video conferencing instead of in-person meetings, police can now offer prosecutors quicker access to investigative materials so they can determine whether criminal charges are warranted and, if so, file them faster, according to the Denver district attorney’s office.
With more than 9,000 felony cases reviewed annually, the process removes mountains of paperwork that typically had congested storage shelves. With a misdemeanor system that’s been paperless for nearly two years, the criminal justice system is nearly all electronic.
“If our IT people and the attorneys who worked on this had been assigned to the flying car project instead, we would all have flying cars today,” DA spokeswoman Lynn Kimbrough mused.
Cases previously were manually entered into two different systems, once within the police department and the other into the DA’s computers. Material such as driver’s license data and police body-worn cameras are now downloaded automatically into the prosecutor’s system.
The process is also expected to cut down on any human errors that occurred with information that had been entered manually.
