How Rochester (MN) PD Modernized records, evidence, and reporting

About Rochester PD

Rochester Police Department serves a mid-sized Minnesota community with approximately 130,000 residents and has a team of 160 sworn officers. We sat down with Captain Paul Gronholz, who led the agency’s transition efforts, and interviewed him about the agency’s transition to Axon Records and Draft One.

Rochester replaced a 30-year legacy RMS with Axon Records to consolidate reporting, digital evidence, and report writing into a single, modern workflow. Early results: officers save roughly 20–25 minutes per report with Draft One, enabling hundreds of hours to be reinvested into community engagement, officer wellness, and proactive policing — while improving report quality and integration of body-worn video into investigations and court work.

The challenge

Rochester’s legacy records vendor had reached a point of stagnation: no road map for integrating the fast-growing volume of digital evidence and limited ability to innovate. Officers were spending too much time behind screens entering data into multiple systems, which reduced time available for patrol, community engagement, and wellness activities. Supervisors lacked simple, real-time visibility into case progress; detectives and officers duplicated effort when multiple contributors worked on the same incident.

As Captain Gronholz explained the situation this way: “Our officers spent too much time behind a computer screen. We wanted our officers to be out in the community making a difference.”

He also emphasized that the department wanted a partner, not just software: “We chose Axon Records because of the company that we’re partnering with. Axon is constantly pushing the envelope of innovation, and we wanted to partner with that.”

The solution

Rochester selected Axon Records (RMS) and deployed it as a catalyst to rethink processes rather than simply swap software. Key elements:

• Axon Records as a single login ecosystem: officers access reports, evidence, and case management from one place, avoiding multiple disparate systems.

• Draft One: AI-assisted narrative drafting that generates a first draft from officer interviews/inputs, reducing time spent composing narratives.

• Evidence integration: seamless links between reports and digital evidence (such as body-worn cameras, in-car video) via Axon Evidence so the source of truth is directly tied to the incident record.

• Collaborative reporting & case management: multiple contributors see each other’s inputs in real time; auto-routing and tasking help supervisors track assignments and case progress.

• Axon App: mobile capability for officers to create and approve reports from smartphones, extending flexibility and modernizing field workflows.

Captain Gronholz stressed the strategic change: “We took the opportunity to rethink everything we did. We used the transition as a catalyst to talk, look at our processes, and make our processes more efficient.”

Rochester planned the move carefully, using their go-live date as the culmination of process redesign and officer training. Leadership engagement and communication were emphasized as essential to success: “Make sure you have support from the top down… You have to communicate with your officers and your non-sworn staff and communicate why we’re doing this.”

The department also partnered directly with Axon in product development and web app testing, a cooperative relationship that smoothed deployment and encouraged iterative improvements, such as case management enhancements and app features.

Results & impact

The migration to Axon Records has led to a number of positive outcomes for Rochester PD.

Time savings and reallocation

Draft One reduced report writing by 20–25 minutes per report on average. Captain Gronholz described the operational effect: “If we've written 1,800 reports over the last two months, our officers have saved about 750 hours, and then we can reinvest that time into the community.”

The department intends to reallocate that time savings toward community engagement, proactive enforcement, and officer wellness (improved on-shift workout time, reduced burnout).

Report quality and investigator effectiveness

The agency also found that interview quality and follow-up questioning improved because officers can rely on Draft One to capture the narrative baseline: “I think our officers… are going to start to have better interviews with suspects, victims, witnesses because they know… Draft One is already doing the work.”

Supervisors have also gained visibility into investigations and status, allowing for smarter review and tasking. They can easily login and see the progress of a case, where an investigator or detective is focused, assign tasks, and more.

Evidence continuity and prosecutorial use

Legacy RMS systems can make it difficult to connect digital evidence to reports, but the integration with Records and Evidence makes this really easy. This has also benefited prosecutors and juries, because everything is shared together.

Operational simplicity and adoption

Rochester PD had used their legacy system for 30 years. Captain Gronholz said, “understanding something new took us some time, but we are finding that the new solution is simpler.” One simple benefit? The Axon single sign-on has reduced friction: “Officers get frustrated by [logging into] multiple places… we wanted them to only have to log into one spot.”

Conclusion: Looking to the Future

Rochester expects to see continued gains from AI and tighter evidence integration in the future. “Form One is going to be a game changer“ by reducing repetitive data entry, something that can be just as frustrating to officers as writing report narratives. Rochester PD is also looking forward to greater courtroom efficiency. As video becomes the primary evidentiary narrative, Axon Records integration with Axon Evidence should reduce officer court time.

Captain Gronholz summed up the outlook: “It’s a good time to be in law enforcement. It’s a good time to be partnered with Axon just because of how they’re innovating.”