The Fort Wayne Police Department has announced a new way for citizens to file incident reports. The system was developed after seeing how the department handled calls during the pandemic.
Fort Wayne residents can now file non-emergency incident reports online through the police department’s website.
The new system has been live for a week, but was announced publicly on Thursday. By visiting the website, people can report crimes in Fort Wayne through a form, which will then be manually taken into the department’s system.
Sergeant Jeremy Webb says the system is designed to avoid having to send road officers to a situation where an officer isn’t needed.
“COVID kind of taught us that certain calls we can handle and not lose any proficiency. So, we need to leverage that technology to make it easier on the community.”
Webb says if someone reporting an incident still wants an officer to come out, they’ll be able to request that. The system is only designed to make both reporting and responding to incidents easier.
He also says there’s no automated intake system for the reports, so each incident will still be filed into their system by hand and seen by a person in the department. Webb warns that this is still an official police report filing, so penalties for filing a false report will still be in place.
