Creating Person Subtypes as Miscellaneous Entities
Your agency can create additional miscellaneous entities that represent subtypes of the person entity. This is useful if there are one or two distinct categories of person types associated with the primary business process.
For example, in a witness protection agency, there are two categories of Person entity. The primary person type is the witness. There are other people associated with the witness or the investigation in different ways.
In a victim support agency, there are several categories of Person entity. For example, victims, support workers assigned to those victims, and other people associated with the victim or the investigation.
By creating person subtypes as miscellaneous entities, the person subtype itself (for example, witness, victim, or support worker) essentially specifies the nature of the involvement (relationship) of the individual in an incident or investigation.
You need to carefully consider how you set up miscellaneous person subtype entities. Over time, your agency could create several different records for one person who has been identified through recidivist behaviour or by association with several investigations and incidents.
For example, the person could be a perpetrator, witness, and an alleged offender in one or more incidents and investigations.
If you don't link (associate) the relevant records, vital intelligence information could be disregarded.
After you create a person record of a specific subtype, you can't change the subtype. You must delete the person record and then recreate it as the correct subtype.
For example, you can't change a witness record to an offender record.
You can only merge person entities that are the same subtype.
For details about merging records, see Matching and merging duplicated entities.
To see all records about a specific individual, search for each person subtype.
Duplicate records of any type could exist in ICM as a consequence of enforcing security and access restrictions.