Police hope to replace computers

Deepa Bharath

The Police Department wants to replace its outdated computer

system with a new one that will give officers improved access to

information and other benefits, officials said.

City officials are close to recommending a vendor to supply the

equipment and plan to begin the $3.3-million project with the new

year, said Rick Kirkbride, management information systems manager for

the city. The recommendation will likely be made to the City Council

on Monday night for final approval, he said.

Kirkbride said the Police Department’s computer systems were

installed in 1982.

“They’ve received only minor upgrades from time to time,” he said.

“The last upgrade they got was in Y2K.”

City officials narrowed down one vendor out of 29 and are

negotiating with them, Kirkbride said. The areas that will see

remarkable improvement with the new systems will be the dispatch and

records departments, he said.

“It will give dispatch greater functionality, greater control and

ease of use,” Kirkbride said. “It will have the ability to grow and

expand with us, unlike the current system.”

The new servers will also make several functions possible that

were unthinkable in the past, he said.

“We can put locators on police cars that will tell us exactly

where the vehicles are,” Kirkbride said.

The new systems will handle a Geographical Information System, a

program that will call up a variety of information at the touch of a

button. For example, if a police officer wants to locate a sex

offender in the city, the system will map out his location.

The new system will also be a blessing for the Records Department

because they will be able to “efficiently retrieve, store and

cross-reference data,” he said.

“They will be able to effectively interface data with county,

federal and state agencies,” Kirkbride said. “The two major additions

in this area will be in-vehicle reporting, which means officers will

be able to file their reports from the scene, and document-imaging,

which will help us scan in more than 250,000 documents we have in

hard copy.”

All of this, of course, is going to take time and effort, he said.

The project will be completed in phases. The first phase, of actually

changing the systems, could take from 12 to 24 months, Kirkbride

said.

“It will definitely be a multiyear project,” he said. “There is

too much cost and labor involved for us to finish this in one phase.”