Police, Fire Hoping For New System
November 25, 2009 by Josh Morgan
The Town of Cheshire is soliciting bids to replace the police and fire departments’ outdated dispatch system and records management system that officials say has become unreliable and time consuming to use.
While the bids are not due back until next month, Police Lt. Jay Markella said the sooner the new system is in place, the better the department will be. Markella explained that the current software is “not really user friendly” and, when writing reports, officers are sometimes “booted out of the system” from their police cruisers and are forced to come in and write reports at police headquarters.
“We are not trying to recreate the wheel,” Markella said. “We just want a system that other departments in the state are using and are comfortable with. We want something that’s user friendly.”
For instance, Markella said that, currently, when compiling monthly reports, an employee in the records department has to manually total up the incidents. With a new system, incident codes could be sorted and totalled automatically, taking less time and accounting for less human error.
“Right now, when a ticket comes in, we have to count them all by hand,” Markella said. “Our system doesn’t allow us to pull up all the tickets or specific offenses. It’s all very time consuming.”
The Town Council approved the money for the project in the 2008/2009 Capital Budget. The two departments split the costs, with $220,000 coming from the police and $50,000 from the fire department.
Deputy Fire Chief Donn Youngquist explained that, with the bids, the department hopes to install computer systems in the fire trucks and other vehicles driven by department officers, like the chief and fire marshal. These computers would display all the dispatch information on the call, quickest directions to the incident, locations of fire hydrants, and pertinent information about the structure.
“A lot of information will be made available to us — we’ll have a plan of attack for the building,” Youngquist said. “This will enhance the fire safety in town. We will have a lot more information on hand to deal with any type of incident.”
Also, Youngquist said components of the new system would allow for better state reporting through the Fire Marshal’s office as well as hold training records and call data. He said the system be totally integrated and would be an “enhancement” to the department.
If someone is arrested, Markella explained that the current systems do not talk with one another; so just putting in a name might not produce results at first glance. Instead, officers need to hunt through different aspects of the records system to determine if a perpetrator has a prior criminal record.
“This will be a big plus for us,” Markella stated. “The information will be all linked together. We will be able to enter a name and everything will be linked together. We’ll be able to see old cases and old offenses.”
Markella said training will have to take place before the new system would be completely put in place, but stated that there would be no service disruption or lack of responses to calls and complaints during the transition. He is eager to get a new system in place because he has a worry that the current system will crash and fail and become unfixable. “We are holding our breath until the new system is put in,” Markella said.