Connecticut Region and Its Public Safety Council Launch an Innovative Public Safety Computer System

Using Cutting Edge Wireless Technology Developed by
Telepartner International and Modac, Inc.

March 27, 1998...Wallingford, CT. Consider that today a law enforcement officer in Hartford has no way of knowing that the same car he is about to stop was stopped moments earlier in Glastonbury or had been seen leaving the scene of a crime in East Hartford days earlier. Similarly, another vehicle observed driving through a Windsor neighborhood in the wee hours of the morning driven by a Farmington resident might not be a cause for concern. However, if that suburban officer were able to access a file of registrations kept by the Region and found a license plate that had been involved in many burglary incidents, the reason to make special note of the event would increase dramatically. Indeed, this attention might actually prevent a crime from occurring.

This was the need the Capital Region Council of Governments (CRCOG) and its Public Safety Council set out to address when they initiated one of the most comprehensive public safety mobile data communications projects in the country. CRCOG, a very successful association of town and city governments in and around Hartford, Connecticut, had a long track record of success in addressing regional needs. This ambitious project, which is now in the process of rolling out to 600+ police cruisers, is the culmination of efforts initiated in 1991 by the Capitol Region Chiefs of Police Association. In the fall of 1994, Connecticut’s Governor John Rowland included the provision for laptop computers in all police cruisers as part of his ten-point crime prevention program. Subsequently, in December 1995, when the State Bonding Commission approved the initial $900,000 of their share of the program, the actual search for vendors started. Late that year, Southern New England Telephone (SNET) was selected as the wireless network vendor. In mid 1997, Telepartner was selected to provide the software. Finally, in late 1997, the laptop computer vendor, IBM, was selected.

 The long-term goal of the project is to offer participating towns a suite of mobile law enforcement software applications capable of virtually all of the information functions required by Connecticut police officers. Furthermore, the plan allows cities and towns to maintain their own records management (RMS) and computer assisted dispatch (CAD) systems while creating a uniform mobile application with consistent reporting forms output across the state.

This project licenses member towns in the Capitol Region Chiefs of Police Association and all member towns of the Capitol Region Council of Governments for unrestricted use of the system within their jurisdictions, and throughout the areas covered by their collective jurisdictions, except for agencies of the State of Connecticut or agencies of the Federal government. The project restricts use of the software to agencies of the State of Connecticut and the Federal government with offices located within the boundaries of the Capitol Region. At the time when the project design was started, most CRCOG member communities had not yet implemented a mobile data communications system. The CRCOG design team hoped that by working together on a shared solution, their common review would increase the chances of success over time.

The benefits to the cities and towns are enormous. CRCOG expects the total cost per town to be much lower than what it would have cost each community to purchase its own system. They also expect significant reductions in total training costs because of efficiencies of scale. By selecting a single system, each town avoids the lengthy process of selecting, testing, and installing it own system. Prosecutors will see data presented in a uniform way, and as a result, be encouraged to share more data regionally. The ultimate result is a much lower cost network, which provides far more effective criminal justice information.

The CRCOG mobile data project was designed to deliver much more than the well-documented benefits of mobile data communications. Some CRCOG members had been among the many early adopters of mobile technology and recognized the value of instant and accurate communications with police cruisers. They also were aware of the value of in-field incident and accident reporting. But, CRCOG members wanted more. They realized the value of much better communications, but were frustrated with implementing a system that, while fast and reliable, only gave them access to a fraction of the information needed by the law enforcement officers. All of the systems available on the market were designed for use by a single, or maybe a few communities. CRCOG’s vision was that the system should be capable of sharing key information across the entire region, with the capability to expand easily to a statewide system at a later date.

These goals presented Telepartner International with some rather challenging design requirements. In order to provide a message switch with enough power and flexibility to satisfy CRCOG’s needs, Telepartner chose to modify a version of their TeleServer ^® as the core component of the overall system. TeleServer is a field proven message switch that had been initially designed to enable large corporations to support hundreds or thousands of users. Using wireless technology that had been developed as an R&D project by a small Telepartner development, the foundation was established. This base technology, combined with several man-years of further development, would comprise Telepartner’s successful proposal to fulfill the CRCOG’s needs.

Telepartner selected BlueLink™ , a fully functional mobile data and field-reporting product as the client add-on. The incident and accident reporting functions of BlueLink, developed by Modac, Inc., had been used by several Connecticut law enforcement agencies and provided a mature baseline upon which the CRCOG requirements could be built. The graphical user interface made it easy to use and minimized training time, and with BlueLink reporting CRCOG would provide member departments with productivity benefits in addition to those of cost and safety. Lieutenant Paul Krisavage of the Connecticut State Police was quoted in Nation’s Cities Weekly, after a recent pilot project, as estimating that automated accident reporting could "translate into 25 extra officers on the street" for that agency.

Phase I of the project enables each mobile unit to access state and national law enforcement databases. A typical request for motor vehicle or warrant information is completed in less than 15 seconds. Although just a short time into the rollout, at any time day or night there are dozens of cruisers connected to the system from any number of member police departments. According to James Donnelly, Director of the New Britain Police Department, "We were pleased that each member community was able to roll out the program and bring members on-line so quickly and easily, and we look forward to the developments which will be made in the upcoming releases throughout this year".

Later Phases, scheduled for completion through the remainder of 1998, will see additional features enabled in the system. The features will include, among others: common interfaces to CAD and RMS systems, in-vehicle report generation, regional database deployment, mapping and geobase support, interfaces to new versions of Connecticut’s statewide criminal justice systems, and more.

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