Built by a sergeant, not a software company.

Years on patrol, plus time as a K9 handler, a field training officer, and a range instructor. That's the part of the job where a posse box full of outdated forms is a daily, physical problem, not an abstraction.

Detective assignments across domestic violence, child crimes, and major crimes, including homicide, sexual assault, and robbery. This is where required notices and victim resources stop being paperwork and start being the difference between someone getting help or not.

A degree in IT and a background in digital forensics, paired with a master's in criminal justice currently underway. Enough on both sides, law enforcement and technology, to build this instead of just asking someone else to.

I ran out of resource cards on a call so many times I have lost count. Standing in someone's living room with nothing left to hand them, unable to meet what the agency and state law require, and the victim doesn't get their documentation. The last card went out three calls earlier. There's no time to restock between dispatches when you're running from one call to the next, and you have to keep going.

That's not a one-off. On a busy night my officers are stacking calls back to back, and every one of those calls might call for a different document: domestic violence, elder abuse, identity theft, human trafficking. There's no pulling over to reload. Whatever's in the car when the shift starts is what they've got.

As a sergeant, I'm the one checking whether they handed out what they were required to. I carry extra cards in my own car for exactly this reason, so when someone runs dry mid-shift, I've got them covered. And when someone didn't restock in time, I'm the one who gets the call to bail them out.

Restocking means going through our own supply closet, and that turned up its own problems. A stack of forms in languages nobody on shift recognized. Versions that had been replaced months earlier, still going out the door. A box of pamphlets I had no idea we even carried, sitting there for who knows how long. None of it was anyone's fault exactly. It just wasn't anyone's job to keep current, so it wasn't.

By 2026, the standard for getting information into someone's hands is digital, not print. There's no good reason a victim's right to that information should depend on a pocket that runs out, when the alternative is a supply that doesn't: electrons instead of paper. Print still earns its place as the backup for when a phone dies or a signal drops. It's a poor way to run something the law requires by default.

New officers usually learn which resource cards to carry from whoever trained them, and that knowledge gets passed down inconsistently, a card here, a habit there, nothing written down. Putting the full library in one place means every new hire starts with the same complete set, not whatever their training officer happened to remember to hand them.

PatrolDocs is piloting in California, run on the side of a full patrol schedule, on its own time and outside of any official capacity. The plan is to keep it in the field under real conditions before taking it to other agencies.