Denver police are praising a new computer system installed in squad cars that they say will make them more effective at fighting crime.
The system, which has been gradually rolling out all year, allows officers to file reports electronically from their squad cars. Global Positioning System devices in the squad cars will allow dispatchers to locate an officer instantly. And officers soon will get dispatched to crime scenes by silent computer messages in addition to the traditional radio calls.
Eventually, detectives will electronically send cases to the district attorney’s office for approval, reducing paperwork.
“We used to have a bunch of stand- alone, Scotch-taped-together systems, self-built by hackers who were self-taught cops,” said Division Chief Dan O’Hayre, who is in charge of technology services at the department. “This is actually the whole package.”
Most important, the new system will create timely data for the weekly meetings at which the department’s brass plot strategies for fighting crime.
O’Hayre said that when he was a district commander in the 1990s, crime statistics were weeks old before they were delivered for analysis.
“You could have a whole rash of car break-ins, and you wouldn’t find out for four or five weeks,” he said.
The $3.6 million system has been a police priority since the 1980s, but it took Mayor John Hickenlooper getting behind it for it to happen.
In January 2006, the department overhauled how it handled data. Before then, the department put an emphasis on accuracy as opposed to timeliness. Now, police say speed is the priority.
“If you see a particular crime pattern in a neighborhood, that is more important than splitting hairs over whether eight or nine crimes occurred,” said Jeremy Bronson, special assistant to the mayor for public safety.
Police Chief Gerry Whitman, who as a patrolman in the early 1990s wrote a graduate school thesis on police radio inefficiencies, pushed for the new software.
Whitman said the new system almost got funded when Wellington Webb was mayor, but the project was delayed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks hurt the economy.
Capt. William Nagle, in charge of crime analysis, said the system captures detailed data. The old system tracked car thefts, he said, but the new system goes further, even capturing the type and model year of each vehicle stolen.
“This will allow us to search data in all sorts of different directions,” Nagle said.
O’Hayre said implementation is running on time and on budget.
“People always say, ‘Just put cops on the street,”‘ O’Hayre said. “We’re finding out that works a lot better if you can tell them where to go on the street and what to focus on because you have accurate data.”
Christopher N. Osher: 303-954-1747 or cosher@denverpost.com
