My personal thoughts: I'd venture to say that all info would eventually get tossed into the "sensitive field" as a matter of a slippery slope. I also think that there's a conflict of interest in keeping notes that are "bad" over "good" (easily retrievable, shareable, and legible). It's self-serving to have physical paper notes. They can easily be "lost", "destroyed", and they only exist in a physical form: an oversight official has to come to the physical precinct house to retrieve the records.
Last time I was in a county office, the application they used was extremely dated. It looked well over 15 years old. Many governments work with really dated software with a skeleton IT crew that can barely keep even that working, much less rewrite it.
Because its easier to cover up non-digital records. Just like sometimes the boss wants to discuss things in person or over the phone rather than in storable text format.
Something no one is discussing about this supposed treasure trove of SS numbers:
1) once its out there, its out there, its like pretending your email address is secret after the spammers are already using it. And after 50 zillion examples of incompetent security, all our numbers are public to absolutely everyone except the rawest of general public (like my neighbor). Anyone I wouldn't want to have access to it, already has it.
2) as per above, they paid $22500 or whatever (hopefully prorated with the low rate or providing the docs) because someone from the city is supposed to be cleaning that data out of the file already. Otherwise that shady guy who owns the money laundering err I mean upstanding and ethical payday loan biz down the street would have already purchased a list of police reports, and done his thing with the SS numbers contained.
3) the easy and cheap part is editing out 123-45-6789 regex numbers. The hard part is in the rare situation of judicial involvement (those people rarely do their job, as per the article's claims) there might be a gag order as part of an out of court settlement or similar.
As an aside, the software used for EMR on the Android tablets is... a horrific abomination.
In other words, the risks avoided by paying the best heuristic computer known to man -- a human -- far outweighs the cost of the resource.
> COP considered dumping the raw data online for anyone to view, but decided against it because it would involve the publication of sensitive personal details—things like mental illness, drug addiction, or cases involving minors.