Sheriff’s Department receives Merit Award

The California State Association of Counties (CSAC) recently announced the winners of their 2018 Challenge Awards. Out of the 275 submissions, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department received a Merit Award in the Administration of Justice & Public Safety category for the development and deployment of its Online Safety and Briefing Training program.

“This award recognizes the Department’s ongoing efforts to provide quality training to employees as quickly and efficiently as possible using technology,” said Sheriff Stan Sniff.

The program was conceived in 2016 to address the need to provide safety and training items directly to specific groups of employees in a timely and cost-effective method.

Traditionally, informal training sessions are done by law enforcement daily during shift briefings. Topics include review of current policies, recaps of recent law changes, as well as distribution of officer safety items.

These sessions are important but are difficult to document without a substantial administrative overhead cost due to their short duration, informal nature and frequency.

The size of this problem scales proportionally with the size of the law enforcement agencies and is compounded when agencies have multiple stations and correctional facilities.

Via the use of a commercially produced software enhancement to the existing Microsoft Sharepoint infrastructure, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department is able to create, distribute and record training items provided to employees in electronic formats (pdf, video) without the overhead costs and delays associated with a paper-based process.

Short quizzes can also be combined with training items to ensure employee understanding or reinforce import aspects of the content.

Once training is completed, the date and topic are automatically added to the employees training record. Training topics can be focused toward employees via the use of their job title or work locations so employees only receive items that pertain to their duties or assignment.

If an employee changes work locations or job titles, they will automatically be assigned training topics that apply to their new position if they previously had not been completed.

The deployment of this solution (Collaboris) versus using a subscription-based training solution provides greater flexibility in the content that can be provided and a substantial financial savings. This solution provides an annual savings of about $250,000 versus the use of a subscription-based product for an agency the size of the Riverside Sheriff’s Department.

Since deployment in late 2016, more than 210,000 training items have been completed by Sheriff Department employees via this system and seamlessly added to their training records.