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ON THE JOB NEWS EYE ON EDUCATION DISCIPLINE SOCIAL NETWORKING JUST HANDED DOWN MISSION CRITICAL SYSTEMS Early Warning Systems: Part 1 An effective EWS shouldn���t require an IT expert to use it. By Randy Means and Doreen Jokerst Randy Means is a partner in Thomas & Means, a law firm specializing entirely in police operations and administration. He has served the national law enforcement community full time for more than 30 years and is the author of ���The Law of Policing,��� which is available at LRIS.com. He can be reached directly at rbmeans@aol.com. Lt. Doreen Jokerst is a 14-year veteran of the Parker Police Department, a suburban Denver-area agency. She currently heads its Professional Standards Unit and operates its early warning and internal-affairs tracking system. www.LRIS.com (Ed.Note: Part One of this two-part article describes early warning and tracking systems in general. Part Two will focus on specifc early warning criteria, applications and interventions, as well as other research potentials.) E very law enforcement supervisor has an early warning system in his / her head. Sergeants have things they fnd troubling and watch for and so do managers and administrators. The value of an organizational early warning system is that it can aggregate such information, make programmed identifcation of data groupings, and alert supervisors at all levels of possible issues they might not have noticed otherwise. This can be done on paper but computers make it easier and, used properly, do it better. Whether such a system is called early warning, identifcation, recognition, assistance, intervention or some other name, the point is it���s early. Notwithstanding semantics and their obvious importance, the common purpose of such systems is to identify a problem or potential problem before something more troublesome happens. Ideally, this would occur before an actual negative incident transpires and potentially save everyone some grief. Failing that, it would note the occurrence of such incidents for purposes of review, analysis and possible action. So, what does an effective early warning system look like? First, it must track certain kinds of ���risk��� to the department and its members. Second, it must review this and other data and identify combinations of factors that need consideration and possible intervention. This sounds simple but actually requires a great deal of important thinking and decision-making by agency leadership. For starters, activity to negativity ratios must be identifed for different areas and types of law enforcement and alarm thresholds be formulated. In addition to early warning applications, broader uses of tracking systems are possible and benefcial. 12 LAW and ORDER I December 2012 Available Technology and Applications Of course, necessary computer programming can be done inhouse by individual agencies, but there are off-the-shelf software programs available that, used properly, can do the job. Many agencies already use a form of electronic tracking that can sort entries into categories, making it easier to locate and retrieve data. Such programs allow co-locating data categories and also separating them based upon division, assignment, time of day, nature of complaint, etc. Regardless of the system utilized, it is critical the agency makes the system ft the organization and its activities, rather than the reverse. Not all thresholds should be set the same and not all triggers and risk indicators are the same for every agency. Naturally, there are common concerns such as discourtesy and use of force, but there are more nuanced risk indicators that are not always identical. Beyond that, there may be state or local mandates of certain requirements and / or unique organizational factors that merit consideration. A tracking system should be a user-friendly tool for tracking employee performance and other issues of appropriate departmental concern. Most programs work on positives as well as negatives, tracking both less-than-satisfactory performance and positive performance data, including awards and commendations. It can and should also be used for agency research. Demographic factors like education, training, age, race and gender can be analyzed as they might illuminate the best ways forward. An agency considering requiring or giving hiring preference to those with four-year degrees might hypothesize this would reduce citizen complaints on the theory that higher education would improve an employee���s human relations skills. Actual real-life data on this question could eliminate the need to guess at the answer. The biggest challenge is visualizing all the pos-