Recently I did a training for a Chicago-area police department who were using Drupal as a method to improve record keeping and workflow in their dispatch department. Naturally I recognize that I was the trainer, but this experience exposed me to a couple of interesting ways that municipalities are tapping into Drupal. So, why do the fuzz want to develop Drupal-based websites?

• Officers used to call dispatch by radio to get phone numbers, license plate numbers, parking notices, addresses for house watches, APBs, offender information and so on. The dispatch officer would look it up and then radio back. A Drupal police intranet means that the officers can search for themselves, get info faster, and leave dispatch free to handle more important police operations.
• Police officers can file paperwork right from the dashboards of their patrol cars, put into moderation for a captain to review, and have it finished even before the officer returns to the facility - and its instantly available to all the other cars and officers at the same time.
• The police Drupal site can talk to other municipal Drupal websites - departments that are heavily laden with bureaucracy can circumvent a lot of archaic steps once the whole city agrees on the same platform for sharing information, and in this case the police are the ones setting the standard. In fact, they have cloned their Drupal implementation and handed it over to other city deparments ready to roll

The several uniformed police officers in the Drupal training were benefiting from the municipality's positive attitude for adopting technology and already had some IT professionals with the skills to roll out a basic Drupal site. This training put many of the players (admins and users, my favorite people) on the same page in terms of basic knowledge and even vocabulary. One officer said, "Look at me, I'm finally calling everything [in Drupal] by the right name."

I think they should take their work to their next police conference and shop it around, they are likely the only police force using Drupal as a dispatcher.