When Every Officer Wears Five Hats
Chatham University sits in Pittsburgh and runs a public safety department of ten full-time officers. Ten people covering close to 3,000 students, plus faculty, staff, and a campus that doesn’t stop for weekends or semester breaks.
That reality is familiar to campus chiefs everywhere. A small team handles everything — dispatch, patrol, incident reports, parking enforcement, and whatever else lands on the department’s plate before lunch. The margin for wasted time is thin. So when a system adds friction instead of removing it, the whole department feels it.
Chatham’s team was working with a records system that was badly outdated. When an officer wrote a report, names and vehicles got typed directly into the body of the narrative. They weren’t stored as separate, searchable records. If someone needed to know how many calls had involved the same person, there was no way to look it up.
And then there was parking. The department has always handled permits for the campus, and that ran on paper applications — a manual process from start to finish.
Two problems. Both grinding hours out of a department that didn’t have hours to spare.
Why Chatham Moved to ARMS
In 2024, Chatham made a change. The chief at the time wanted reporting that would support the department’s accreditation work.
ARMS solved both problems at once. The department started with ARMS Parking and later added ARMS CAD and ARMS RMS — putting dispatch, records, and parking into the same system, managed by the same vendor.
That mattered. Instead of one platform for records and a separate fix for parking, Chatham got both in one system.
What a Call Looks Like Now
Here’s what happens today when a call comes in.
Dispatch opens the incident in ARMS CAD and fills in the basics: incident type, location, times, names, and vehicles. Everything gets entered once, up front. By the time an officer picks it up, the report is already set up — the fields dispatch filled carry over, and the officer doesn’t re-enter them.
The officer opens the report, adds the narrative — what happened, in their own words — and routes it through for approval.
“The officer only has to go in and type up a narrative and send it through for approval. It’s very quick. It’s time-saving.”
Sharee O’Neil, Public Safety Coordinator and Lead Dispatcher, Chatham University
No rebuilding a report from scratch. No retyping what dispatch already entered. For a department of ten, less time on paperwork means more time on patrol and answering the next call.
Records That Actually Answer Questions
The bigger shift is what happens after the report is filed.
Names and vehicles are now saved as their own records in the system. When someone needs every call involving a specific person, they search the name and the whole list comes up. Same for vehicles. The data is structured, so it answers questions the old narrative-based system never could.
That matters for daily operations. It matters for accreditation. And it matters the next time a chief or coordinator needs to explain what’s actually happening on campus, backed by data instead of guesswork.
Parking Without the Paper
Students, faculty, and staff now apply for parking permits online through ARMS Parking. No paper applications piling up in the office, no manual tracking. Enforcement, citations, and appeals run in the same system as dispatch and records.
Parking is one of those responsibilities that quietly eats hours when it’s manual. For a department that already handles everything from incident reports to campus patrol, moving permits online meant reclaiming time the team couldn’t afford to lose.
Support That Keeps the System Working
The department also points to support: when they contact the ARMS support team, they usually hear back within an hour or two. If something gets sent to development, ARMS follows up.
For a 10-officer department, responsive vendor support is a basic requirement. The system has to work, and when something comes up, the team behind it has to show up.
What It Adds Up To
Chatham runs dispatch, reports, and parking in one system now. Names and vehicles are searchable across every call. Parking permits are paper-free. And a ten-officer department runs all of it in one place.
“I love ARMS, the CAD, the report writing, the parking. I think it’s very user-friendly. I would highly recommend it.”
Sharee O’Neil
That’s the recommendation from someone who uses the system every day. If your department is dealing with the same problems Chatham had — outdated records, unsearchable data, paper parking — the full story is worth a read.
Read the full Chatham case study → arms.com/case-studies/chatham-university/
Want to talk about what ARMS could look like for your department? We’d love to hear from you. → Contact ARMS
