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Systems Consolidation a Boon for Colorado Police Agencies

Being on the same system allows Greeley, Evans and Weld County law enforcement to share data, from information obtained during a traffic stop to identifying crime trends affecting each jurisdiction.

(TNS) — Evans, Colo., police officer Jason Schissler logs into the department’s Computer Aided Dispatch system through Spillman. The Evans Police Department went live with the Spillman system Nov. 4, joining Greeley police and the Weld County County Sheriff’s Office, which have been using it since 2013.

Earlier this month, the Evans Police Department upgraded its records software to Spillman in an effort to streamline its own operations and promote information sharing with other agencies in Weld County.

Evans police went live on Spillman Nov. 4. It replaced the department's 15-year-old system, NetRMS, which was managed by Motorola. The company announced five years ago it would stop providing technological support for the NetRMS system by the end of 2018, prompting the search for a new information management system by Evans police.

Evans police Cmdr. Jason Phipps was tasked with researching vendors for a new records system, which was complicated early on by another agency's decision to also move to Spillman.

Local residents might remember 2013, when Motorola announced it was dropping support for its NetRMS system, was the same year the Weld County Regional Communications Center, the sheriff's office and Greeley police all transitioned to Spillman. The system received less than rave reviews and within a year county officials were searching for a new vendor for its emergency communications and records management needs.

The county would eventually opt to stay with Spillman.

"We had already invested a lot of capital in Spillman and we later learned we didn't implement it as well as we could have," said Weld County Sheriff Steve Reams. "Rather than go through a whole new set of growing pains by moving to another system, there was a concerted effort to determine if we were using Spillman to its optimal capabilities.

"It took a lot of effort by the IT department, but I think it's a much more functional system than we thought back in 2014."

Evans police decided to join the Spillman system this summer for a variety of reasons, Phipps said, noting it appeared any issues encountered early on by Greeley police and the sheriff's office seemed to be worked out. Costs, information sharing and work efficiency also were highlights of the program.

When Phipps began five years ago the process of researching a new information management system, Motorola offered to provide the department with the latest version of NetRMS, which would have allowed Evans police to stick with software it was already familiar even though it wouldn't receive technological support after this year. The cost for the upgraded software was $500,000.

Spillman, which also is managed by Motorola following the 2016 acquisition of Spillman Technologies, came with a far cheaper price tag thanks to the county already holding a license to operate the system. Adding Evans as a partner agency to Spillman saved the city hundreds of thousands of dollars, Phipps said.

Officer productivity and efficiency also is expected to improve now that Evans is on the same system as Greeley and Weld County, especially when it comes to filing paperwork.

Whenever a police officer makes an arrest, there's paperwork that goes along with it, such as a report, an affidavit for arrest, which goes to the Weld District Attorney's Office, and bonding paperwork used by deputies to book a suspect into Weld County Jail. Evan officers would then have to make copies of all of those documents and then manually re-enter them at the department because Evans police was on its own records management system.

Spillman is a lot like Microsoft Office in the sense that it is a suite housing a variety of different public safety modules, including Computer Aided Dispatch, Records Management System and Jail Management System, among others. When an officer writes a report in Spillman, much of the information needed by the jail and the district attorney's office automatically transfers to those other forms.

"One of the obvious benefits is officers are spending less time duplicating reports and more time in the community," Phipps said. "The reports are also more accurate now that we're not re-entering information into multiple systems."

Being on the same system also means it's never been easier for Greeley, Evans and Weld County law enforcement to share data, from information obtained during a traffic stop to identifying crime trends affecting each jurisdiction.

"We're married to Greeley being so close to one another, but we might as well have been continents apart in terms of our ability to share information," Phipps said. "The importance of it might not be fully understood by the average citizen, but internally we understand the importance of information sharing is in law enforcement."

©2018 the Greeley Tribune (Greeley, Colo.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.