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Westchester County cops have big plans for the little Blackberry.

The Blackberry wireless handheld has become such a hit with senior management officials in Westchester County, N.Y., the county police just had to try it. They've deployed 10 of the devices in a pilot project to see if the little computers are as useful for the police as they have been for other county personnel.

The county first tested the pager-like devices more than three years ago, and they were so popular that senior officials are now required to have one. "It's actually one of the few things that worked on Sept. 11," said Norm Jacknis, Westchester County CIO.

The Blackberry, developed by Research In Motion, provides access to the New York State Police Information Network and the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), the federal criminal database. Officers use the device during routine traffic stops to check for warrants as well as driving records of suspects instead of radioing to dispatch and tying up the airwaves.

"Previously, the only alternatives were to call up over the radio, which is a tremendous waste of radio time and people's time," Jacknis said. "Or spend about 10 times as much money for a hardened laptop in a car, which also tended to take the officer away from the vehicle that he was looking at."

Seeking Feedback
County police began using the devices in October and planned to test them for 30 to 45 days, rotating the Blackberries among officers on a weekly basis to get as much feedback as possible from as many different sources as possible. Two of the 10 units are in the hands of county detectives, while patrol cops are testing the others. Early returns were generally favorable, as the devices give officers access to more information more quickly.

The Westchester County police have varying responsibilities, acting in some areas as the highway patrol or the local police force. They also serve as the bomb squad and detectives.

"One of our immediate uses was the marine unit," said Capt. Martin McGlynn, commanding officer of the services bureau. "We have a boat patrol, and it's pretty hard to get a laptop on a boat these days. They were checking boat registrations right out on the water, which is neat."

The device saves precious airtime, and it may lead to more arrests of wanted individuals because it makes it easier to check on suspects. "We're finding they're running plates that might not have been run, and hopefully, that will lead to more hits," McGlynn said.

The Blackberry also is a welcome addition for officers on foot patrol and in squad cars that aren't equipped with laptops. "Some of our police have spent as much as $10,000 on a single laptop in a car," Jacknis said. The Blackberry is around $300 with a $40 monthly service charge. "We want to see actually how the officers take to this because this is a little different. The keyboard on the Blackberry is something people get used to when they've had a lot of daily experience with it. But for police who are not normally sitting in front of computers the way managers are, it may be a little different."

Portable Power
At 3 inches by 4 inches, the Blackberry is easy to carry on the streets but is "a little tight for some people," McGlynn said.

"The ease of use is not bad. We found once you get used to working with the scroll buttons on the Blackberry it starts coming pretty quickly," he added. "You can't always thumb in a name in front of somebody that you're talking to. In the future I'm hoping they can build a little scanner into it that will just take it off the back of the [driver's] license. That's not that far away, I don't think, either."

So far, police have found the Blackberry superior to some other forms of wireless technology they've tried, according to Jacknis. "We have rather hilly terrain, and that makes radio transmissions of all kinds a little difficult," he said, adding that there are a couple of areas in the county where coverage of the Blackberry is not as good as they'd like.

"The nice thing about the Blackberry is most of the time you don't lose coverage," he said. "What happens is the response slows down because you've got a much thinner piece of bandwidth." He said with other wireless communication they've tried, such as cellular digital packet data, coverage is lost in those areas.

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In addition to the 10 Blackberry devices being tested by the county police, there are about 100 others being used by county employees and Jacknis said, "Everybody wants one."

"It's become part of our pattern of working," he said. "It used to be that in meetings a question would be raised, and then somebody would say, 'I don't have the answer to that, but I'll get back to you when I get back to my office.' Now, instead, they send an e-mail to the staff and oftentimes, before the meeting is over, we have the answers that we need."

If good feedback continues come from the officers, the Blackberry project may just turn onto a "rollover," according to McGlynn. "Basically, these are a client of our New York State Police Information Network terminals, which is the state database. It's where we do our DMV checks and our NCIC checks."

Since the software is already in place, the rollover would simply mean buying the hardware and renting the service, assuming that the county's budget jibes with the Blackberry pricing, and if the county gets a government discount, according to McGlynn. "It really would seem to me to be pretty much a rollover at this point. Everything is in place to do it."