Keeping information secure is just one of the challenges law enforcement officers have to deal with. Even amongst the same department, only certain people should know certain things. SAS Law Enforcement Intelligence has the functionality to limit access to sensitive records to approved users only.
A Confidential Information is a person who works undercover for law enforcement to gather information about criminal activities, and could be criminals themselves, hired to work undercover in exchange for leniency or exoneration.
There are two different data objects involved in creating a confidential informant, an Informant Request and an Informant Profile. In our example below, we have three different users, Officer Mallory, Sergeant Smith and Officer Canning.
- Officer Mallory thinks James Bulgar has a lot of information about crime in the neighborhood and has convinced him to be an informant, so he creates an Informant Request. In the request, he completes all the available information; first and last name, date of birth, sex, aliases, etc. Once complete, he submits the Informant Request to his supervisor Sergeant Smith for review.
- Sergeant Smith reviews the information in the Informant Request and determines if the informant should be approved or denied. If approved, she submits the Informant Request to Officer Canning for verification.
- Officer Canning's job is to ensure that James Bulgar is not already in the system as a current or previous informant, so the database is kept tidy and up to date. Officer Canning verifies there is no conflict, and the Information Request returns to Sergeant Smith.
- Now that Sergeant Smith knows there is no conflict, she approves the Informant Request, which creates a new Informant Profile assigned to Officer Mallory.
- Officer Mallory completes the information in the Informant profile. (Using the autofill toolbar, we can populate information from the Informant Request data object directly into the Information Profile). She then submits the Information Profile to his supervisor Sergeant Smith for approval.
- Sergeant Smith, approves the profile, which makes it active.
Only the officer assigned to the Informant Request and an Informant Profile, their manager and members of the conflict checking group are able to view the records. If I'm signed in as Officer Valorie, for example, and perform a search for James Bulgar, neither the Informant Request nor the Informant Profile would be in the search results.
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