Retention and CLEMIS (RMS)?

[Rachel Rains]

Hello –

Our agency uses CLEMIS as our RMS, and I oversee retention. I have recently taken over some court roles in our records department; When we get an “order of dismissal” or a “Judgement of Sentence” that determines whether the person pled, we will use this to break down our physical files and scan them into our RMS. This helps us, as our agency deals with upwards of 60k CFS each year, sometimes more. As you can imagine, our case drawers are overloaded and cannot take much more.

When we get those orders from the court with the plea, we will take everything that is not LEIN or the report (because the report is already linked in CLEMIS) and scan it into the case file digitally in CLEMIS and it remains there.

Is this in compliance with schedule 11 and retention for law enforcement agencies, or do we need that physical file? CLEMIS will never purge anything, so it’s acting as a permanent retention holder for those records…

Thoughts? Thanks!

[Melissa Sullivan]

Schedule 11 only tells you the minimum length of time we have to retain the record, not the format we are required to maintain them. So, it doesn’t say that you have to maintain paper versus digital documents. You would not be required to maintain the physical copy if you have scanned it in and can reproduce it. Wouldn’t your court maintain those records as well?

[Rachel Rains]

Melissa,

Thank you! The court should be (not sure of their retention policies) BUT, we like to keep a copy if we have it just in case.

Happy to learn of this info.

Happy Holidays 🙂

[KayCe Parsons]

At Jackson PD, we have very little in our paper files, and almost everything we have is in our RMS. The things that we have in a file are typically items which needed signatures, and therefore we have the hard copy. After 3 years, we ensure everything for that case is scanned into the RMS and then we destroy any paper copies.

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