Thursday, May 13, 1999
Laptops give police more time for patrolling
BY JANE PRENDERGAST
The Cincinnati Enquirer
CRESCENT SPRINGS — See that police car sitting on the side of the road? The officer's doing his reports inside, on a laptop computer. But he's watching you, too.
That's the whole point behind the new computers in Crescent Springs cruisers — do police work, but stay on the road where people can see and be seen.
“Today, an accident report can take 15, 20 minutes of paperwork after you leave the scene,” said Chief Mike Ward. “And that's an easy one. When you get a bunch of calls on a shift, you end up going back to the office and spending an incredible amount of time on paperwork.”
That led, as it does for many departments, to complaints from residents. They wanted to know why they saw cruisers at the station so much.
So the department applied for, and got, a federal grant of more than $20,000 from a pot of money aimed at keeping officers on the streets more.
“Right now, we're like the test-site agency,” the chief said. “So far, it's looking like it's working very, very well. There are so many possibilities.”
The department is the first in the county to take the new county dispatch records system into its cruisers. And officials at the Kenton County Police Department are watching Crescent Springs to see how it works long-term. The county department runs the dispatching and records management system.
“That's the first hurdle,” said Capt. Ed Butler, spokesman for the county department, “to see how it works. But the ideal situation would be that the entire county would have laptops in their vehicles.”
All Kenton County cities except Covington and Erlanger are dispatched by the county. All of those but Park Hills bought the records management system software so they are directly compatible with the dispatch and records system.
But Crescent Springs is the only department to input the data via cruiser computers.
Officers with the other departments still have to leave the road to type their reports into the system at their offices.
“The greatest benefit is that the cops are out there on the street,” Capt. Butler said. “If you have the computer in the car, you can pull over and make a report. And you stay visible on the street.”
Crescent Springs officers have found other benefits, too. Once they became accustomed to the system, Chief Ward said, they learned that doing reports directly on their laptops is faster. Another big benefit is virtually immediate access to work other departments on the system are doing.
Take a burglary report, for example. Maybe Crescent Springs reported one last night. By as quickly as this morning, other departments on the system can access that report and determine if burglaries they're working are similar. In the past, that kind of check required calls to all other neighboring departments.
Eventually, the county sees the laptop computers as also lessening its load in the dispatch center.
When the state's computerized system to access state and national crime computers comes on line, the officers can do that from their cars too, instead of calling for help from a dispatcher.
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