Six Caution Categories That Front-Load Officer Safety
The Cautions field is the first thing an officer needs when they pull a name from the database and recognize it from a previous FI. None, Weapon, Infectious, Violent, Runner, Unstable. Six discrete categories that tell the next officer what to expect before the interaction starts, not after the subject has already moved toward them.
A field interview database without caution flags is a contact record. A field interview database with caution flags is an officer safety tool. The difference is that first field on the query result — the one that reads "Violent" in red — that changes how the officer positions themselves before they've said a word.
The Physical Description Architecture
Twenty-plus fields covering age, DOB, POB, gender, ethnicity, skin tone, build, height, weight, hair color, hair style, facial hair (boolean plus type), and eye color. Then three separate text fields: scars/marks, tattoos, and notes. Then three photo fields: front profile, left profile, right profile.
That's the standard three-view booking photo setup applied to field contacts. An officer who photographs a suspect during a non-arrest FI and captures front, left, and right profile gives the investigators who need to identify that person later something to work with. A written description of a partial facial beard and a scar above the left eyebrow means something very different when you can also see the profile photo.
The tattoo and scars fields deserve specific attention. Tattoo placement and design are often more reliably identifying than a name or physical description — a person can change their appearance, but the Reapers MC insignia on the left forearm is permanent. An FI database that captures tattoo descriptions becomes a gang intelligence tool when you can filter on tattoo content across hundreds of contacts and see who has what affiliation markers.
Vehicle Data as the Secondary Identifier
The vehicle section is a full registration record: boolean flag for whether a vehicle was present, vehicle type (eight options), make, model, door configuration, color, plate number, province/state, VIN, and year. A subject who is stopped on foot but arrived in a vehicle is half-documented without the vehicle record. The VIN is the link between the person and the registered owner — when the registered owner is different from the person in custody, that discrepancy is investigatively significant.
Plate number plus province is the dispatch query that happens before an officer approaches a vehicle. Having those two fields properly populated in the FI record means a records clerk can cross-reference a plate from an unrelated call and immediately pull the FI history for that vehicle — even if the registered owner has changed.
BOLO and Report Linkage
Two separate linked entry fields: Report and BOLO. The Report link connects the FI entry to the incident report it was generated from. When an FI contact is taken at the perimeter of a property crime scene, that contact connects back to the property crime report through the Report link. If that contact later becomes a suspect in a subsequent offense, the FI record with its physical description and location GPS data is retrievable through the case connection.
The BOLO link is the active surveillance mechanism. When a contact in the database becomes a subject of a Be On Lookout, the BOLO record links directly to their FI profile. An officer in the field who pulls the contact's name gets the physical description, the three-view photos, the caution flags, and the BOLO status in one query.
The SO field — sex offender status — is the registration compliance layer. A registered sex offender encountered during an FI who is in violation of residency or curfew restrictions is a different encounter than an unregistered contact. The field ensures that information is surfaced in the record rather than requiring a separate CPIC/NCIC check to discover.
The Location GPS field pins the contact to the specific geographic point where the encounter occurred. After 500 FI contacts logged across eighteen months, the location data mapped against incident reports tells you where the hot spots are — where repeat contacts cluster, which intersections have the highest frequency of field interviews, and whether that frequency correlates with the reported crime distribution in the same area.