Law enforcement case management system (LECMS)

Crime is a cancer that is costing most governments around the world billions of dollars every year. The situation is worse in developing countries largely due to weaker democracy and lack of adequate resources to fight the scourge. In Zambia, there are a number of agencies that have been mandated by law to fight crime. Some of these agencies include Zambia Police, Drug Enforcement Commission (DEC), Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC), Immigration Department etc. Currently most Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) are handling cases manually which comes with a lot of challenges. The ACC for example is in the process of migrating to a Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) case flow management electronic system called GOCASE. This system comes with its own challenges as well. This project reviewed the manual system as well as off-the-shelf electronic case flow management systems in order to identify their limitations. It was discovered that the manual system has challenges such as lack of centrality, vetting and searching for data is tedious, limited security, no redundancy and recovery mechanism and lack of link analysis of events, suspects, witnesses and crime types. The Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) comes with challenges such as high purchase and license costs as well as lack of adaptability to the local environment.
Based on these limitations, we developed a home grown solution of the case flow management system that will address the problems of the manual system and the off the shelf systems and has features such as two factor authentication, case file creation (electronic docket), event scheduling, exhibit tracking and multimedia storage, audit trail tracking and report generation.
KEYWORDS: Case, Electronic Web based, Law enforcement agency, Crime, Authentication, Case file