Computer system will aid police in speed and efficiency

STAFF PHOTO BY DAN PARKER New computer system Dispatcher Crystal Bath is seated before some of the Port Aransas Police Department’s new computer equipment. The department has started up about $240,000 worth of new equipment that is expected to make police work faster and more efficient. Port Aransas police recently fired up a new $240,000 computer system that they believe will make their work faster and more efficient.

The system went live on Monday, June 6, culminating about two years of work to research, purchase, install and boot up the system. It includes a server, software and workstations, all new, throughout the police department.

“Our goal is, we should see, hopefully, better response times overall,” said Lt. James Stokes, of the police department. “We should have better turn-around times on reports, getting them kicked out to the public.”

Part of what’s new is a computeraided dispatch system. Also new is a records management system.

“The system we were using before was a DOS (Disk Operating System) that was not very user friendly,” Stokes said. “The one we have now is Windows-based, and it’s very userfriendly.”

The new system will reduce, in a number of ways, the amount of time police spend writing reports, Stokes said.

Stokes offered this example: Police reports often have officers entering the same person’s name and identifying information repeatedly if they are both the victim of and witness to a crime. While the old system required manual input of that information repeatedly, the new system will require just a few clicks of a mouse to get the job done, Stokes said.

With the old system, if a piece of suspected stolen property is found, police would have to do a highly specific search of their records to be able to tell if they had information that the property had been reported stolen. If the records search isn’t done specifically enough, an officer might not be able to find a record of such a piece of stolen property even if it’s in the system, Stokes said.

With the new system, an officer can make a query, and records of a number of objects generally fitting the description will pop up, Stokes said.

The new system will be better at helping police recognize patterns in crime, like whether a number of burglaries appear to have been committed by the same person, based on descriptions of how the crime was committed.

The new system will work well with computer terminals that officers will be getting in their patrol cars in the near future, Stokes said. The terminals will give officers a number of new abilities, such as receiving transmissions of mug shot photos while they’re still in the field, he said. Officers also will be able to type in reports while they’re still out on patrol.

The terminals are being financed through a $50,000 grant that PAPD won several months ago from the U.S. Department of Justice.