About BOLOs
A BOLO ("be on the lookout") is an alert notice: a suspect photo, an incident summary, a description of the suspect's method, and a distribution record. You create a BOLO from an incident or a case and circulate it to store staff and partners so they can watch for an active suspect.
The one rule that governs everything
A BOLO splits into two parts, and almost every behavior in the feature follows from the split:
- The BOLO owns the alert: its title, incident summary, reason, method of operation (modus operandi), disclaimer, status, and priority. You edit these on the BOLO itself.
- The source incident or case owns the facts: the suspects, vehicles, products, loss amount, and geography. You edit these on the incident or case, never on the BOLO.
So editing a BOLO's wording never changes the underlying incident, and editing an incident's facts flows back onto the BOLO automatically (a background process keeps the fact-derived fields current) without touching the BOLO's wording.
Where BOLOs come from
A BOLO is never created from scratch. There are exactly two creation paths:
- From an incident's detail page: see Create a BOLO from an incident.
- From a case's BOLO tab: see Create a BOLO from a case.
Each path links the new BOLO to its source. But BOLOs are independent records afterwards: a BOLO survives the deletion of whatever it was created from, and closing or archiving a case does not change any BOLO made from it.
Note: A BOLO with no linked incident still appears in the feed and discovery list, but it drops out of geography-, date-, and tag-filtered views, because those filters are derived from linked incidents.
Who can work with BOLOs
Every BOLO surface is scoped to your organization and nothing narrower. Category, case, and territory isolation do not partition BOLOs: everyone who can view them sees every BOLO in the organization, including ones made from cases they could not open.
BOLO availability does depend on your organization's feature entitlements: BOLO stays available as long as your organization is entitled to Incidents or Cases, and goes dark only if both are withdrawn.
| Role | View | Create / edit / status | Share | Manage shared views |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Administrator, Supervisor, Internal/External Manager | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Investigator, Store Coordinator, RAPM, DAPL | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| ORC Analyst | Yes | No | No | No |
| Platform Administrator | Yes | No | No | No |
| Auditor, Viewer, External Partner, Store Associate | No | No | No | No |
A role that cannot view BOLOs gets neither of the two sidebar items (BOLO Management and BOLO Feed) and cannot reach any BOLO surface. Everything personal (saved views, collections, your focus list, your review history), is private to you and never visible to anyone else, including managers.