Vancouver Police Department opens record division

The Vancouver Police Department on Tuesday opened to the public its own records division after 20 years of contracting out the service to the Clark County Sheriff’s Office.

The impact on users — cops, records requesters and others — should be minimal, minus the fact that they’ll go directly to the source for records questions.

Working with a consultant from Florida, the department was able to reverse-engineer what they needed, McElvain said, and create the timetable to do it. The consultant, PRI Management Group, typically works with agencies trying to fix records department problems, he said, so Vancouver had an advantage in that they were starting from scratch. “It was an opportunity that, as we set ours up, we would employ the best systems that we could,” McElvain said. “They were measuring everything that needed to be done, how long it would take and, essentially, that helped us define what our staffing would look like.”

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