Paper Filing Era Coming to End at Sheriff's Department

By City News Service:

Riverside County supervisors are expected next week to approve a sheriff’s request to replace the department’s decades-old paper filing system with an electronic archive that will allow personnel to store most documents in a secure database.

“We’re excited to finally get this done. It’s been a long process,” Assistant Sheriff Jerry Gutierrez told City News Service. “It means archiving documents electronically instead of piling them up in bins.”

The sheriff’s new “Retention of Electronic Documents System,” or REDS, has been in development since July 2011, when the Board of Supervisors authorized all county agencies to migrate away from paper filing in preference to e-filing.

“REDS will improve the accessibility and retrieval of official records, facilitating the production of these records as needed for public or business purposes,” according to a sheriff’s statement posted to the board’s policy agenda for Tuesday.

Gutierrez said in-house technical staff created the REDS architecture, which recently underwent vetting by security analysts from the Department of Information Technology and was rated a “trusted system.”

According to sheriff’s documents two copies of all approved documents will be stored in different locations within the system, after a 30-day holding period.

The original scanned document will then be shredded, Gutierrez said.

He said documents destined to be electronically archived include payroll sheets, inmate booking files and memos.

The sheriff’s resolution attached to the agenda item noted that REDS will not permit “additions, deletions or changes to the original document” and that original hard copies will not be destroyed if there’s sufficient notice of “litigation ... an audit or records request” received by sheriff’s personnel.

A number of items will not be stored electronically, for practical and official reasons. Exceptions include coroner x-rays, latent fingerprint files and video images, according to the sheriff’s department.

Gutierrez was uncertain of the potential cost savings that will be realized from the new data management system, which he emphasized will take some time to reach full utilization.

“We’re a huge agency,” the assistant sheriff said. “We have to train people how to operate this. But we’ll move as quickly as possible.”

The corrections division will be the first to utilize the system, after which it will be phased in for other units to access, according to Gutierrez.