Offenders Management
App
Business Requirement
DISC (Database & Intranet for Safer Communities) is a unique online publishing platform designed specifically for sharing information and current awareness among a group of individuals or organisations which share a common purpose. That includes news, documents, ‘alerts’, information about upcoming events – as well as information about individuals. Right from the start DISC was designed to ensure compliance with the Data Protection Act, so it’s widely used for managing personal data, even sensitive personal data. Not only does DISC ‘force’ compliance among its administrators – it makes it difficult for members of each group not to abide strictly by the DPA too.
Where it is used
DISC is the UK’s most widely used online information-sharing system for local Shopwatches, Pubwatches, Business Crime Reduction Partnerships, Business Improvement Districts and a growing number of major shopping centres. There are currently over 140 DISC implementations throughout the country, covering more than 250 towns, city-centres and rural areas, accounting for in excess of 25,000 actively participating businesses. DISC is especially valuable in situations where the Administrator needs to communicate regularly with a community made up of independent organisations or individuals – such as retailers or licensees in local business crime reduction partnerships, helpers in charities and other voluntary organisations, or, in almost any commercial organisation, customers. It reduces the local crime through sharing information with other areas. One feature of DISC is that individual Administrators of DISC – enabled Partnerships can access each others’ offender data in what the company calls ‘Consolidated Offender Dataviews’. Thus Administrators can, with simple easy-to-use filters, check to see if seemingly low-level offenders active in their own areas are, in fact, more widely known and therefore perhaps prolific or ‘Level Two’ offenders.
The Need
Since it was a developed app, our most important focus was fixing existing bugs and adding enhancement features to make sure the DISC users had a better experience while using the system. DISC was built with Incident reports and Intelligence reports where users can create new Incident of the crime with complete incident details, offender details, police involvement, offender images & incident images too. Our job was to create a Crime Report based on the Incident report so that it can be sent to police from the system.
Crime Reporting
This enables the DISC Users to submit ‘Crime Reports’ to a Police email address, which is added to DISC by the Administrator. When a User submits an Incident Report through the website, they will have the option of sending a Crime Report about the Incident to the Police. Crime Reports are generated using data from the Incident Report, Offender and User records, with extra fields for the User to complete themselves.
WORKFLOW
CRIME REPORT SUBMISSION
CRIME REPORT FORM
CRIME REPORT PDF FORMAT
CRIME REPORT SUBMISSION ENABLED/DISABLED – ADMIN PANEL
And the sub-module: Witness Statements
To give users the option of also creating a ‘Witness Statement’ when they create a Crime Report. A Witness Statement is an official document that could be used in court as evidence.
Witness Statements will be created as PDFs, using data from some fields from the Crime Report and the user record. The completed Witness Statement PDF will be attached to the emails that are sent to the police and to the user, along with the completed Crime Report PDF.
WITNESS STATEMENT SUBMISSION ENABLED/DISABLED
WITNESS STATEMENT PDF FORMAT
The Challenge & The Solution
After carefully studying all of the requirements and the desired outcomes we set forth to design and create this new system that would result in these outcomes. It wasn’t easy. We spent many weeks studying the way the app is working and it takes to understand the db architecture used in the system, done many client skype calls, group discussions since the app was built in older version of rails and we were able to prioritize what our client wanted and were able to put together a plan in action that would ensure their goals were met. Ruby on Rails Web Application, UI/UX Design, DB architecture, Incident Report Management, Content Management (Alerts, Articles, Incident, ID-sought), application deployment, Crime Report Analytics, Member Management.
Client
Offenders Management App
Man Hours Spent
1600+ Hours
Technologies
- Ruby 1.9.3-p125,Rails 3.1.3, Haml/Sass/JS.
- Gems – Devise, texticle, httparty, activeadmin, sass-rails, delayed_job_active_record, carrierwave, remotipart, mdquery, activerecord-postgres-hstore, database_cleaner, haml, factory_girl_rails
Results
- A bug free application with new UI design.
- Users can submit the ‘Crime Reports’ to a Police email address while submitting an Incident report.
- Crime Reports are generated in PDF format using data from the Incident Report, Offender and User records.
- User can enable/disable Crime Reporting option from User admin panel.
- User has the option of creating a ‘Witness Statement’ while creating a Crime Report.
- User can enable/disable Witness Statement submission in Crime Report form itself.
- Witness Statement will be created as PDF, using data from some fields from the Crime Report and the user record.
- The Crime Report PDF file and Witness Statement PDF will be attached to the emails and will sent to the Police and to the user.
Client details are protected under strict NDA and, therefore we do not disclose such information. However, we can provide references once you make an enquiry.