RMS & Incident Reports
RMS is where the fuller incident report or case writeup lives — the narrative you build after an arrest, citation, or any call significant enough to need one. It's a different layer from the individual records covered in Records & Reports: a case doesn't replace a person, vehicle, warrant, citation, or arrest record — it references and links to them.
Dashboard
Opening RMS shows you:
| Section | What's in it |
|---|---|
| My Drafts | Cases you've started but haven't submitted yet. |
| Returned to Me | Reports a supervisor sent back for changes. |
| Pending Supervisor Review | Your own reports currently submitted and awaiting a decision. |
| Recently Approved | Your own reports that have cleared review. |
| Open Cases | Every open case org-wide, not just yours. |
If you hold reviewer permissions, you'll also see a department Review Queue — every submitted report waiting on a decision, not just the ones you wrote.
+ New Case starts a report. You'll set a title, the department it belongs to, and a report type — Field for something short, Full for a complete incident report — plus an optional synopsis or narrative to get the writeup started rather than opening to a blank page.
The case workspace
A case is organized into tabs. You don't have to fill them in order, and not every case needs every tab populated.
- Overview — incident date/time, location, location type, district, and beat.
- Offenses — one entry per offense: statute code and description, classification, whether it was attempted or completed, whether force or a weapon was involved, and notes.
- People — link an existing civilian record to the case with a role: Victim, Suspect, Offender, Arrestee, Witness, Reporting Party, Complainant, Person of Interest, Guardian, Parent, Next of Kin, Involved Person, or Other. You can tie a person to a specific offense within the case rather than just to the case as a whole.
- Vehicles — link a vehicle record with a role: Involved, Suspect, Victim, Stolen, Recovered, Impounded, Evidence, Seized, or Other.
- Property — category, description, value, status, and an optional link to an owner or to a specific offense.
- Evidence — type, description, collection details, packaging, and location. Items are numbered automatically as you add them.
- Narrative — the synopsis plus the full narrative text.
- Supplements — follow-up entries added after the fact, across nine supplement types.
- History — a read-only timeline of everything that's happened to the report, start to finish.
Evidence and chain of custody
Every evidence item carries its own chain-of-custody log, covering the full handling history across 13 event types (collection, transfer, storage, release, and so on). Entries are append-only — nothing in the log can be edited or removed once logged.
The chain-of-custody log stays open for new entries even after the report itself is approved and locked. Custody keeps changing hands after a case closes, so this is the one part of an approved report you can still add to.
Supplements
Once a report is submitted — or even after it's approved — new information doesn't get added by editing the original narrative. Instead, add a supplement. Like the custody log, supplements are append-only: they sit alongside the original report as their own entries rather than rewriting it, so the record of what was known and when stays intact.
Report lifecycle
A report moves through a fixed set of states:
Draft → Pending Review → Approved
↕
Returned
Void is available from any pre-approval state.
- Submit. The author submits a draft, moving it to Pending Review.
- Review. A reviewer either Approves the report or Returns it with a required comment explaining what needs to change. A returned report goes back to the author, who edits and resubmits it.
- Approve or Return. Approval is final for the report body; a return sends it back around the loop as many times as it takes.
- Void. The author can void their own report, and anyone holding the void permission can void any report, at any point before it's approved.
You can't approve or return your own report, even if you'd otherwise have reviewer permissions. Someone else has to make that call.
Once a report reaches Approved or Void, it becomes fully read-only — every tab, including the narrative and all supplements. The one exception is the evidence chain-of-custody log, which stays open for new entries as described above.
If your community also runs Nexus for investigations, an Add to Investigation button appears on a case, letting a detective pull it into a broader, multi-case investigation. See Nexus & Investigations.