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Anchorage, Alaska, Plans Overhaul of Emergency Dispatch Systems

Vastly improved mapping technology, more sophisticated laptops for patrol cars and new systems for writing police reports and processing evidence are all pieces of a planned upgrade project.

(TNS) — Anchorage’s police dispatch and record-keeping computer systems are showing their age, and the city is embarking on a major push to modernize them with interactive software that could someday connect to residents’ smartphones. Vastly improved mapping technology, more sophisticated laptops for patrol cars and new systems for writing police reports and processing evidence are all pieces of a planned upgrade project, mostly centered on operations at the Anchorage Police Department. The upgrade would place police and fire departments in the same software system for relaying 911 calls to emergency responders, officials said.

The plans also pave the way for a 911 system upgrade that could someday allow Anchorage residents to text 911 or send photos and videos to dispatchers. The city’s current 911 contract with Alaska Communications expires at the end of this year.

In the short term, however, the police department’s computer dispatch and record systems are about two decades old. Software contracts have expired, technicians have disappeared and pieces of replacement hardware, no longer available new, are sitting in boxes in the police station.

APD chief Mark Mew said the systems are “being held together with chewing gum and baling wire.”

“They still function, but if they break, we’re in a world of hurt,” Mew said.

On Tuesday, the Anchorage Assembly approved a $3 million contract with San Diego-based TriTech Software Systems for a new computer-assisted dispatch system for Anchorage’s police and fire departments and a new records management system for police. A completion date has been set for 2018, though various elements can go online more gradually, said Lt. Kenneth Spadafora, APD’s emergency communications commander.

The Anchorage Fire Department has been using TriTech software for the last decade.

“The important thing for us is we’re going to be sharing a system, which is going to give us a lot of efficiencies,” said Heather Wilson, information systems manager at AFD.

The technical synchronization for the two dispatch centers, a recommendation drawn from a 2013 study of the city’s dispatch system, opens up the possibility that police and fire dispatchers could someday be physically in the same place. But for now, it’s an extra layer of backup that also lowers maintenance costs, Mew said.

As the project gets underway and as the city works to salvage its over-budget, botched SAP software project, officials have a keen awareness of the costs of failure.

“We’ve got to make sure this thing doesn’t fail,” Mew said. “We’re not going to be cocky about this. We’re very careful about it, very prudent about it.”

Unlike SAP, the city won’t need to hire a special consultant to install and configure the project, said internal audit director Peter Raiskums, who served as project manager on the software contract selection committee. Raiskums compared it to buying TurboTax at Costco.

“We’re buying a system that’s supposed to work when we put it in,” Raiskums said. He said the Nevada-based contractor who helped guide the contract selection process is moving to Alaska to see the project to completion.

When it comes to IT systems projects, Mew said his department has already learned the hard way. Two software installations failed before police successfully installed the current system, Tiburon, in the mid-1990s. He said that there’s no “false sense of security” among those involved with the project.

“The risk of failure will affect people’s lives,” Mew said.

When someone calls 911, the call goes first to a call taker at the APD dispatch center. If it’s a police call, a dispatcher enters the information into a computer and then relays it to cops in the field. If the call requires firefighters or paramedics, the police dispatcher transfers the call to the fire dispatch center.

At the police dispatch center this week, call takers were answering calls and looking intently at several different screens.

“911, what’s your emergency?” one dispatcher asked. She paused. “DeBarr Costco? What’s going on there?”

Another dispatcher was talking to a caller about a burglary in progress. “Did you hear them kicking the door down?” She then asked the caller to describe the getaway car.

In the future, dispatchers could receive videos or photos of getaway cars that could be forwarded to police. That would be part of upgrading the city’s 911 system, which Mew said is the next step.

Anchorage is among the nation’s many call centers that use outdated analog equipment that can’t receive text messages, videos or photos. On the national scale, efforts are underway to build a broadband network dedicated to public safety uses ever since Congress in 2012 passed a law mandating the creation of the network.

Those efforts have not yet reached Alaska, Mew said, and how the police department will find the broadband to support a new digital network in the meantime has not been decided yet. But, he said, “that is coming.”

“This is where the nation is going,” Mew said.

©2015 the Alaska Dispatch News (Anchorage, Alaska), Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.