Police officials say they are working diligently to fulfill their obligations under the Alvin W. Penn Act, but a number of obstacles have prevented them from doing so yet. Chief among them is that the department's Computer Aided Dispatch vendor, TriTech Software Systems, is not set up to send the information to the state correctly. Working out that problem costs $33,000, which the city has not yet allocated to the department.
"It is like two people having a conversation with a wall between them. Once we pay to have it fixed, we will be able to [upload] the information easily. There has never been any impropriety, nobody has been hiding anything," Assistant Chief James Matheny said. "I feel like I am on the defensive about what we are doing here. If there is a question from you guys or the public in general, we are happy to give them an Excel spreadsheet (detailing Stamford's 36,000 stops in 2014) and say, `Have at it.'"
Another problem is that about half of the traffic stop data the city has collected is incomplete or was entered incorrectly, due to what Matheny said were training problems. Those have been addressed, he said, and the department is now collecting the data more accurately, but there remain problems with the in-car computers to resolve took, in addition to building the data pipeline to the state.
The department voluntarily gave The Advocate an Excel report of its 36,033 traffic stops conducted in 2014, but because so many of the records are incomplete or inaccurate, it's not possible to infer anything from the remaining complete records with any statistical relevance.
Beginning in October 2013 Stamford along with the rest of the state's 106 police agencies, began collecting more information on their traffic stops that included the race and ethnicity, along with other information, about the drivers they were pulling over.
But almost a year later, in September 2014, when a statewide report was compiled from the data gathered for the last seven months of 2013 and the beginning of 2014, the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut noticed that Stamford's entries numbered only a little more than 600 stops, even though Stamford, at about 3,000 traffic stops per month, conducts more than any other city in the state.
That's when the technical problem came to light. Ken Barone, a research specialist at the Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy at Central Connecticut State University, which co-authored the report and was working with law enforcement to get their data submitted to the state, said that until that point he had no inkling there was anything wrong with Stamford's traffic stop submissions. Barone worked with the Stamford Police Department to figure out that the problem was with the computer-aided dispatch system: TriTech, one of 28 computer-aided dispatch vendors operating in the state, was the only one charging a department to get connected to the state's Criminal Justice Information System portal.
Having identified the problem, Matheny said the department then worked out a way to transmit the traffic stop information to the state with an Excel spreadsheet application.
But after analyzing the data, Barone found out that because of missing information on the stops, nearly 50 percent of the data could not be used. As a result Stamford will be the only department in the state that will not be included in the university's analysis of traffic stops across the state from Oct. 2013 to Oct. 2014. That report is set to be published near the end of March.
Stamford is not entirely alone in this. Other departments have had trouble getting the information to the state too. Barone said that both New London and West Haven police departments are unable to submit the first five months of data for the report. But the problems they had were identified earlier than Stamford's was, and the data they do have are useable, and Barone said New London's and West Haven's data will be included in the report with an asterisk saying that five months of reports are missing.
The training problem, however, seems unique to Stamford. The reasons for the traffic stop reports being riddled with mistakes include insufficient training and glitches with the programs used on the computers carried in police cruisers, police officials said.
Barone says the failure of the department to have the proper software installed on their on-board computers is certainly a contributing factor.
Sgt. Kevin Fitzgibbons, who works in the Stamford police information technology department said one glitch had to do with the on-board computer's license-reading software. He said that officers performing traffic stops use their computers to read the licenses, which would then enter information such as the person's name address and age automatically into the proper fields in the online reports.
But some of the officers did not realize that the licenses do not contain information on the driver's racial or ethnic background and instead of going back a page in the online report to fill out whether the person was white, black or Hispanic, skipped that part of the report and submitted the online report without that critical information. With miscues such as that and others, 47 percent of the reports were rendered unusable, Barone said.
Fitzgibbons said he has since held roll call training sessions to rectify that problem.
Barone says that many departments, whose reports were 100 percent accurate, have fail-safes built in to the on-board computer software that prohibit the reports from being submitted without all the information fields filled in, unlike in Stamford.
Matheny and Fitzgibbons said they are working with TriTech to get such a system for Stamford.
Barone says that considering all of the other departments across the state being able to submit their traffic stops to the state, the Stamford police have to shoulder some blame for the failure as does TriTech.
But Fitzgibbons says they were not made aware of the problem until at least September, and didn't know about the problems with the incomplete records until after that.
"Now after more than a year has passed, they run the numbers and tell us that only 50 percent are viable. It's like going three-quarters through the school year and you finally grade my tests and it turns out that I messed up in the first quarter and now I have a failing grade," Fitzgibbons said.
Contact was made with a TriTech sales director who said he could not comment for the company and said he would look around for someone who could, but the call was not returned.
Redding Police Chief Douglas Fuchs, who with Barone sits on the state's Racial Profiling Prohibition Project advisory board and helps local police departments with their submission problems, says Stamford's problems were not identified until very late in the game.
Fuchs said that between six and nine months ago he was working with 15 or 20 departments experiencing problems collecting their traffic stop reports in the proper format and Stamford was not on the list.
"With every other department I was able to contact the chief and they were able to work through the problem they were having and submitted properly. I was never notified by anyone that Stamford's data was not accurate until a couple months ago at a meeting. This caught me off guard," Fuchs said. "Chief Fontneau was also caught off guard. He believed the data was being sent out properly, but because the CAD vendor's on-board module was incomplete, the data wasn't there."
Fontneau said, "If we weren't aware we had a problem, we couldn't correct a problem that we weren't aware of. Once we were made aware of the problem after the data was analyzed, we fixed the problem."
Matheny says he thinks the department is being unfairly targeted for dragging its feet to solve the problem.
"So, who is getting the finger pointed at them is Stamford PD. If it is a scapegoating thing, they are barking up the wrong tree. Our stuff is transparent as it can be. Our numbers match up really well¦ match really closely to our demographics. I don't think they can ask for much more," he said.
©2015 The Advocate (Stamford, Conn.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC
