The NYPD
The New York City Police Department is the largest municipal police department in the United States. For more than a century, every officer on patrol carried a handwritten memo book: the official record of a shift, from patrols and arrests to victim and witness statements, and even meal breaks.
The challenge
Paper made that record hard to work with. Entries varied from officer to officer, handwriting was not always legible, and finding an old entry meant paging through books, with each officer keeping track of dozens of notebooks.
Paper also left blank space that could be filled in after the fact, the kind of gap that makes abuses such as faked entries possible. The department needed a record it could read, search and trust, in the hands of every officer on the street.
How Megsoft collaborated
In partnership with Microsoft, Megsoft's team helped develop the app that replaced the memo book, part of the department's effort to modernize its mobile platform and bring current technology to officers in the field.
On February 17, 2020, officers began recording their activity logs in the app on department-issued iPhones, about 37,000 of them at the time, and each note went to a department database instead of a notebook.
What the app brought to patrol
Typed, consistent entries
Activity logs written on the phone in one format, with no handwriting to decipher.
One department record
Notes kept in a department database, so officers no longer tracked dozens of notebooks.
Search from the field
Past entries found by date or keyword, wherever the officer was.
A record that holds
No blank space left to fill in later, which closed the door paper left open to altered entries.
Why it matters
A police department runs on its records. Moving the memo book from paper to a phone made the record of every shift legible, searchable and harder to alter, and it put a modern mobile tool in the hands of officers across New York City.