Police Prepare To Inaugurate

New Computer System

By Andrew Gorosko

Police department staff members are receiving training on the department’s new IBM AS-400 computer system in preparation for the system going into operation later this month.

Robert Berkins, the police records manager, who will serve as the computer system administrator, said Tuesday police tentatively plan to put the new system into operation the week of January 24.

Mr Berkins shut off the department’s old IBM System 36 on December 31 because that system was not Y2K-compliant and would fail to accurately record dates when the year changed from 1999 to 2000.

Since the old system was shut down, police record keeping has been done on paper. Information from those paper-based records will be entered into the new computer system when it goes into operation, Mr Berkins said.

Keeping police dispatching records on paper has not posed any problems, Mr Berkins said. The paper-based record keeping system temporarily in use is similar to the way police kept records before they used computers.

 The old IBM System 36 has been restarted and reset to a pre-2000 date to provide police with access to past information, Mr Berkins said.  New information is not being entered into that system, which has been in use since 1989.

 With the new computer system, police have “geo-coded” the entire town to make it easier for them to respond to calls. Under the geo-coding system, a coordinate grid has been laid out over the entire town, providing police with specific information on locations. The geo-coding system splits the town into five patrol sectors, each of which is divided into two subsections. The system is keyed to intersections.

Also, the new system allows common place names and their locations to be entered into the computer to speed police responses to incidents, Mr Berkins said.

“It’s really an aid to a dispatcher,” he said.

Police dispatchers and sergeants will be receiving dispatching training for the new $180,000 computer system in the next few weeks, Mr Berkins said.

The new system will have 10 networked personal computers running under the Microsoft Windows NT operating system. In the future, a set of laptop computers intended for use in patrol cars will be integrated with the main computer system, Mr Berkins said.

Also, a new 911 emergency response system, which was recently put into operation at the police station, will be interconnected with the AS-400 system after the AS-400 is operational, Mr Berkins said.

 The new computer system uses the Aegis public safety relational database program. It is designed to eliminate repetition and reduce the amount of typing required by system users, Mr Berkins said.  The Aegis software could be adapted for fire and ambulance dispatching, he said.

The police department has been making the transition from its old to new computer system across a three-month period, Mr Berkins said.

“There’s a definite learning curve. It’s going to take a while for us to get trained on it,” Mr Berkins said.

Although the new computer system will not be any more complicated to use than the old system, police department staff will have to learn how to use the new system, Mr Berkins said.

 “The system we had was a dinosaur… very slow,” he said, noting that certain information searches with the old system were very time consuming.

“You’re going to gain a lot of speed,” he said, adding, “I think we’ll do better in the long run… It’s long overdue.”

Police attempted to acquire a new computer system in 1995 to speed up information retrieval, but the town did not endorse a computer replacement, he said.

Instead, hardware was added to the old computer, but it did not help matters much, he said.

As the computer system administrator, Mr Berkins manages computer operations, deals with security matters, and does troubleshooting.