Some things have changed, the now chief city prosecutor said. But lingering inefficiencies continue to dog her staff, which generated and maintained 39,796 criminal and traffic cases last year.
Police reports are sometimes recorded on pen and paper then entered digitally into the system, where they should have gone the first time. When a case moves from city to county to appeals court, proceedings are often recorded twice — by government staff in separate buildings. When a defense attorney requests records, a clerk from one court physically walks over to another to photo-copy files.
And with 57 percent fewer employees since the recession, Wilms doesn’t always have a lower-paid clerk to run errands on the public dime. “We have high-dollar staff attorneys making copies” of arrest reports and traffic stops. “Is that the best use of their time?” she asked City Council Monday in a pitch for a better, cheaper way to do business.
Akron City Council has signed onto an agreement with governments and courts in Summit County, Cuyahoga Falls, Stow, Tallmadge and Barberton to streamline the way legal records are filed and accessed, a move Wilms and the county said will free up highly qualified staff while expediting records requests made by lawyers and the public.
The six local governments will buy software from Westlake-based Matrix Inc. to create “one seamless system” that connects all law enforcement agencies. Together, the intergovernmental group, which covers the county’s three municipal courts, will pay $192,000 to implement the new system and, over the five-year contract, pay about $150,000 annually for unlimited data storage and technical support, said Stephen Byrne, deputy director of Information Technology for Summit County. Akron’s contribution will be higher than others and in line with the inordinate number of cases it produces.
Matrix, which serves 20 Ohio counties and some of its largest cities, allows defense attorneys and researchers with permission to review sensitive case files, sign up for email alerts or get instant access on the web instead of asking clerical staff to pull and copy files. The company’s data storage will sync with the website provider the city is paying to store body-worn camera footage recorded by police.
“It’s an efficiency from start to finish in this process,” Wilms said.
©2017 the Akron Beacon Journal (Akron, Ohio) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
