Community First: the voluntary resident registry

What it is

Community First is a voluntary database of residents who have asked your department to hold information that helps responders help them: medical conditions, allergies and medications, safety notes about the home, and up to four emergency contacts. It lives under Pre-Incident & ISO → Community First.

The case it was built for: a crew finds a confused man who believes it is 1969 and that he lives somewhere else. Run his driver's-license number, read that he has dementia, and call his daughter — in the time it takes to find him a chair.

How residents get in

1. Public sign-up link. Open Community First → Public sign-up link, turn it on, and share the link or QR code on flyers, at open houses, or on your department's page. Residents fill in their own details and agree to a consent statement.
2. Office entry. Officers add residents from paper forms with + Add resident.

Resident submissions arrive as Pending review and are invisible to responders until an officer approves them. That is deliberate: a public form that feeds straight to the crew is how a made-up "safety note" about a neighbour ends up on a call. You can turn on auto-publish in settings if you accept that risk.

Looking someone up

From the office page or the Responder app (the 🤝 button on the dispatch list), search by driver's-license number, phone, name, date of birth or address. A license number is the strongest match; a name will also find close spellings. Only Active records are searchable from the app. Apparatus tablets cannot search — they are shared devices.

Privacy and the access log

• Every identifying field is encrypted at rest. Searches work on one-way fingerprints of the values.
• Every search and every opened record is logged with who, when, from where and what was searched — and kept for five years. Admins see the log under Community First → Access log.
• Records ask to be re-confirmed every two years so stale information does not sit in front of a crew.
• A resident can ask to be removed at any time; an admin uses Delete permanently. The access log keeps only the record number.
• Nothing is shared with other departments.

Guidance only. Rules on health data, minors and records retention vary by state — check with your solicitor whether your department needs its own consent form.