Records Bureau

To request copies of a police report or other records—you may go to Incident Report Inquiry, email police.records@cantonohio.gov, or call 330-489-3172. Office hours are 9:00 am to 3:00 pm, Monday through Friday, excluding holidays.

About the Records Room

The Record Room is currently staffed by seven Information Clerks and an Administrative Clerk. The Records Clerks are responsible for the safe and efficient maintaining of records of the day-to-day operation of the Canton Police Department. They collect, file and update these records daily in order to more accurately and expeditiously serve our department and the Criminal Justice Community as a whole, in criminal investigations.

In addition, they aid in the public's desire for information or explanation about the various aspects of its records. All of the calls for police service made to our department this year will, in some form or another, find their way to the Record Room and become a permanent part of our information system.

Reports & Case Files

The Records Clerks answered thousands of phone calls, faxes and letters requesting copies of incident reports, accident reports, and general information. They processed the thousands of case supplements typed by the City's Word Processing Department, gleaning from them the names and personal data of the many victims, suspects, witnesses and arrested subjects who are tried by our courts for these crimes.

They prepare the case files that reside in the Record Room for the City and County Prosecutors' Offices before trial. They maintain the criminal history files of the Canton Police Department for use by our various bureaus in their search, through these files, for possible suspects in crimes by matching their descriptions and methods of committing crimes to those descriptions and methods that have been entered in the past.

Fees

The records room collects fees for the dissemination of copies of reports and fingerprinting of persons for licensing and other purposes that are requested by citizens and make reports of these transactions. The fees are set by City Council and are part of the city ordinance.

Crime Statistics

In addition to the many other duties, the Record Room Administrative Clerk has the responsibility of compiling crime statistics as they apply to the changing trends of criminal activity throughout the nation. These statistics are submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice, through the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Clarksburg, W VA, where they are added to those of other agencies throughout the United States.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) then compiles detailed crime statistics for the local jurisdictions, the states, and the nation and distributes this information to aid these law enforcement agencies in their common fight against crime.

Staying up to Date

As in past years, the Record Room is continuing the process of upgrading our computer system and its software to more efficiently aid the public and our own officers and staff in obtaining information in a timely and precise manner. Many adjustments in the programming and screen designs were done to accommodate new methods and requirements of maintaining the Information System and to streamline the data input to the system.