It is Northrup-Grumman. Once you get logged on the system, it is lightning fast. A few bugs here and there but an improvement over the old system.
Thanks for bringing me into the 21st Century, Starman918. I've heard about the other enhancements but somehow never caught wind of your new CAD system. N-G are good people to work with, and few of LAPD's delays were their fault.
The MDC issue was somewhat controversial as a bond measure had to be passed for the city to equip mobile units with them.
Just as I was becoming a faux-competent RTO, LAPD got two LEAA (remember them?) grants in 1973 and 1976 as seed money for research and testing of the whole MDT and CAD concept. In 1977 the voters passed Charter Amendment 1, a $40-million
temporary tax override to fund the whole package. I don't remember any hue and cry about the computers, but there may have been some. The $40 million paid for the 506-band radio system infrastructure, all the ROVERs, the MDTs, the CAD system and the now-former dispatch center in the dungeon far beneath City Hall East. It was our cramped, windowless, claustrophobic home from 1983-2003. And the "temporary" tax override was just that: it expired on schedule in 1982, and covered the entire project. Except within a year or two the CAD system was trying to handle a workload that hadn't been expected until the 1990s. It was awful at times for the next 18 years, lagging as much as a minute behind our keystrokes. But dispatchers being pretty resourceful and flexible, when the computer couldn't keep up we did it the old fashioned way, in our heads and with scratch-paper.
I'm surprised that the MDC's can be replaced in lean tax years such as we are currently experiencing. Is some federal homeland security funding involved here?
It's all
1992 dollars and the interest on them that have been buying LAPD's new MDCs, Exsmokey. That was when $236-million Proposition M was handily passed by 73% of the voters, in what coincidentally was the wake of the so-called Rodney King riots.
The new communications system bond issue was accurately described at the time as a "20-year plan," including building two new dispatch centers, a new generation of radios and MDTs (ended up being MDCs), and the new CAD system. And it's taken them just about all 20 of those years to get it done. The biggest final stumbling block was getting the repeatedly-changed CAD system to interface with the entirely new MDCs that they ended up with. I had tossed my headset by then though, so I missed those two parts. But not much, from the stories I got from my old co-workers.
Did we get off-topic somehow?
