Officer Labs: NueGOV Public Safety

One of the biggest challenges any law enforcement agency can face is accurately tracking equipment, its use, wear and tear, maintenance, replacement cycles and more. It may seem odd to some, but the importance of accurate information is just as important to the five-man agency as it is to the 5,000-man agency. Only the dollar values involved are different. In “the old days,” these records were kept on paper and would fill countless file drawers. There would even be paper forms to track the other paper forms, and it was inevitable that, due to human error, items would be “lost in the shuffle.” We eventually graduated to digital documents like spreadsheets in Excel and, finally, we have graduated to software suites and systems that empower us to most efficiently track all of the aforementioned items. We just recently were able to verify the field-testing and use of a system called NueGOV created by Navjoy, Inc.

OFFICER Magazine has previously covered the NueGOV systems in our October 2022 issue, but in this case we were privy to the actual field test and ongoing use of the system as we sought to confirm its function, ease of use, expansion, interaction with other systems and more. In today’s world of multiple software suites and systems, integration and ease of function is vital, and that was the first question we asked about NueGOV - how well does it handle integration and “paying nice” with other systems?

The answer was, “very well.” In fact, when we inquired about one of the biggest technology manufacturers in the law enforcement space today, AXON, we found out that NueGOV works almost seamlessly with the AXON systems. So, what exactly does NueGOV do?

NueGOV is an asset management system that, once set up, automates tracking and reporting for anything in your inventory that needs such. During our evaluation of the system, we had the opportunity to speak with Lt. Stephen Lockard from a major police department in Indiana. His (brief) backstory is that he had developed a digital tracking system for the agency’s inventory, but it was built from paper records, and he couldn’t share responsibility for it with the heads of different parts of his agency such as the firearms unit, the fleet management people, the TASER managers/instructors, etc. When he was empowered by his chief to seek out a system that would fulfill all the inventory management and asset tracking needs, he found NueGOV. Per the lieutenant, he spent about four months working with NueGOV to develop the system to meet the specific needs of the agency, and beyond that, the municipality. The data sets for the items tracked are set up as “buckets” (for lack of a better term) and can be broken down into subsets. For instance, “Firearms” is a bucket but handguns, rifles and shotguns are all subsets. The agency adopted NueGOV approximately two years ago, and in that time the Lieutenant reports that they’ve been very responsive to the agency’s needs anytime change or development was required. “Over the years, I’ve tried multiple systems, and NueGOV was the most efficient, most responsive and most cost-effective,” says Lt. Lockard.

As we sought to confirm that the NueGOV system would indeed do everything it was touted to be capable of, we inquired if it could be used to track assets often overlooked… such as K-9s. The answer was a surprising YES. What about non-agency owned municipal property? YES. If the item being tracked can be “dropped in a data bucket,” it can be easily added. If not, Navjoy’s team has been responsive, per the lieutenant’s statements, to add the necessary data sets.

Based on our knowledge of the system as presented, all of the research we can do online for the system and the firsthand knowledge and use of the system from Lt. Lockard, OFFICER Media Group is happy to award our “Tested Field Rated” seal of approval to the NueGOV system.