A New Age in Crime-Fighting, Denver

[jimmnn]

http://tinyurl.com/9rpma

Denver is betting millions of dollars that new laptops in patrol cars and a cutting-edge records-management database will speed the police department into 21st century crime-fighting, helping them quickly spot trends and identify faceless serial criminals.
The police department's current computer system is more than a decade behind other agencies, handcuffing patrol officers and detectives to an antiquated conglomeration of 1,000 databases that often don't "talk to each other," a technology supervisor said.

Jim<

 

[SCPD]

Thanks Jim. It should be a great system. This is the only part that could be a little bit of a bummer for the listeners:

Phase 2-2006

Patrol officers will be able to use laptops to:

• Receive "silent dispatch" 911 service call messages.

But the big stuff has to be on the radio still. For one thing, they're not in their cars all the time.

 

[eyes00only]

ANOTHER BUMMER is that somewhere in that article it said that officers could do a car to car type thing on the laptops too.

Jerry

 

[rick521]

ANOTHER BUMMER is that somewhere in that article it said that officers could do a car to car type thing on the laptops too.

Jerry

I know every agency is different, but one of my duties in Salina is to monitor car to car messaging. It is the new way to line up coffee breaks, ask about finished assignments and other misc. items. It takes way too long to type a message of importance. You won't be missing much.

 

[Troop]

It's probably been that way with their current MDC system, I know we had messenging with our old system and the new

 

[jimmnn]

It's probably been that way with their current MDC system, I know we had messenging with our old system and the new

Hey we're talking Denver here, most cars never had a "current MDC".

Jim<

 

[Steve2003]

You will still hear major calls on your scanner. All of the borning stuff such as routine traffic stops, will most likely go through the MDCs.

 

[Troop]

Hey we're talking Denver here, most cars never had a "current MDC".

Jim<

oh I thought they had them already, computers in the DPD cars must have had the same value as ours for the last couple years...paperweights

 

[scanman310]

When I lived in Ft. Collins years back, FCPD had the old fashioned "MDT" and most code 2 calls and all code 3 calls came over the air. Disp would say "check your MDT for a call" once in a while but for the most part, not much was missed. I don't care about barking dog calls anyway.
Matt

 

[BobWeb]

Last summer, I paid a visit to my brother who lives in Albuquerque and is a police officer there. I went on a ride-along with him on a Saturday night and discovered they use computer aided dispatch via MDC quite often. Many times he would take a call by simply pressing a couple of buttons on his laptop computer. They, too, had the ability to send messages to each other via the MDC. I wasn't too worried about it since most of what they tend to send each other is "shop talk" and not terribly interesting. The most urgent calls were still done via the radio (in that case, it is Pro-Voice, so we can't monitor it anyway). Overall, I thought it was a pretty good tool, but, of course, one that leaves most of us out in the dust as to what is going on, except in the event of very urgent traffic. In any case, I'm not worried too much about Denver doing so.

 

[eyes00only]

Thanks for the many thoughts on my car to car post.

Jerry

 

[datainmotion]

Here are the new laptops being deployed @ DPD/DFD/DEMS

http://gobookiii.com/