Grand Prairie Case Study: Tiburon CAD
Originally published in Law and Order Magazine, April 2008
CAD Grand Prairie Police Communication Center
Written by Thomas M. Manson
The
Grand Prairie, TX Police Department is a medium-sized agency facing
metro-sized issues and calls for service. Nearly 320,000 inbound calls
for the various services dispatched by Grand Prairie’s Communication
Center were place in 2005-06 alone. And as one of the fastest growing
cities in the United States, it is increasingly pushed to respond to
higher number of calls for service. In the past few years, fire service
and EMS dispatch have been added to their duties. These additions,
combined with their existing police dispatch duties, combined with
recent population increases have encouraged the department to create
one of the most efficient dispatch and communication centers in North
Texas.
In middle of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, the Grand
Prairie Police Department is surrounded by 6 million official
residents, the fourth largest population in United States and the
largest population center in TX. The city of Grand Prairie itself is
actually located on a long and narrow strip of land roughly 25 miles
north to south and in a few places less than a mile wide. Straddling
parts of three counties and supporting a population of over 125,000
people, the city covers an increasingly dense area of homes and light
industry about 80 square miles. Between January and December 2006, more
than 34,000 traffic and pedestrian stops were recorded; 50% of those
stopped were not even residents of Grand Prairie.
But things
in Grand Prairie have not always been as busy as they are today. Ed
Scheitle is the senior IT analyst at the Grand Prairie Police
Department with 19 years of experience working with computers and
communications. He recalls that the number of call for service were
fewer and the systems used to handle them 19 years ago were
considerably more humble than the geographic information systems (GIS),
computer-assisted dispatch (CAD) and automatic vehicle location (AVL)
systems in use today.
The technology in the Communication
Center has certainly changed, and the technology used by the callers
themselves has changed also. The most dramatic change in the past 20
years for the callers is the medium they use to contact the
department—the mobile phone. Shearon Moffitt, Grand Prairie
communication supervisor with 18 years of experience, has personally
seen the improvement in technology and communications for the
department.
At the beginning of her career with Grand
Prairie’s Communication Center in 1989, only a few people had cell
phones, referred to then as “bag phones.” At that time, most calls to
the Communication Center were made on land lines whose location was
easily determined. By the 2005, the origin of inbound calls had
reversed; many people had disconnected their land lines and were
instead using their cell phones to dial 9-1-1.
“Cell phones
are very volatile creatures,” Shearon Moffitt. “We get a lot of phone
calls from cell phones [that] are not initialized. The cell phone does
not actually have service—but is capable of dialing 9-1-1.” In the
circumstance where a call to the 9-1-1 has been placed but a location
is not given—extra efforts are expended to find the caller’s location.
“If we get a cell phone call, we know we have a disturbance, but the
person wasn’t able to tell us where they were calling from, we can call
the cell phone company and get additional information. It is a process
to tell where someone [on an uninitialized cell phone] is. It can take
seconds, it can take minutes, it can take hours to pinpoint where you
are.” The added technology in the center, in the form of Internet
access and other software, makes this process possible.
Software Training: CAD, RMS, GIS, EMD and More
Today,
it takes more than a year to fully train a communication dispatcher to
use the multiple computer and communication systems in the Grand
Prairie Communication Center. Once trained, a dispatcher will serve his
duty shift seated in front of a half-dozen flat-screen monitors,
simultaneously control three or four mice, and access and answer
numerous lines of communication to connect civilians in need of service
with the right public safety worker; sometimes helping to resolve a
situation before emergency personnel can even arrive on scene.
But
dispatchers don’t do it alone, and it takes more than just good phone
skills to successfully complete the daily tour of duty. It also takes
technologies like computer-assisted dispatch (CAD), which helps put the
best and closest resources in connection with the caller. In every
public safety job there is a necessary mixture of technology and human
intervention. Traffic stops and DWI/DUI arrest can’t be accomplished
from a computer, but the official report is usually written on a laptop
mounted in a squad car. Evidence must be seized and cataloged usually
in a database connected to a bar code scanner. Dispatch personnel
arguably maintain the closest relationship between public safety
personnel and their computers.
At the heart of the
Communication Center in the Grand Prairie Police Department is an
integrated software communication solution from Tiburon. The company
provides fully integrated command and control, information management,
and analysis solutions to public safety and justice organizations
throughout the United States and abroad. Established in 1980, Tiburon
has nearly 30 years of experience providing automated solutions to law
enforcement, fire, EMS, and corrections. Grand Prairie migrated to
Tiburon in 1986 and has seen many upgrades in the software throughout
the years.
The Tiburon software is truly an integrated
solution, providing an interface for computer-aided dispatch (CAD),
geographic information system (GIS), emergency medical dispatcher
(EMD), records management software (RMS), corrections management
software (CMS), mobile support services, online civilian based
reporting and bar coding of property and evidence. It is also being
integrated to make mug shots and other previously inaccessible agency
data available to officers in the field from within their own units.
In
2003, Grand Prairie upgraded from a text-based CAD and RMS system to a
visual geographic information system (GIS) software package called
Maverick™ from 9-1-1 Mapping Systems. Now instead of reading from
columns of text when a call comes in, communication personnel view a
highly detailed GIS map displaying a matching address. When an address
is confirmed, the software zooms to that location, placing a marker and
a call label. Senior IT Analyst Scheitle said, “9-1-1 Mapping Systems
takes the GIS files and creates the maps for the dispatchers, and it
also displays their location [of available police units], the calls
they’re on, and tracks them using AVL.”
Emergency Medical Dispatch
At
the same time as the GIS maps were installed, Grand Prairie implemented
ProQA™ EMD software. Being able to route the nearest police unit to the
location of the inbound call is almost taken for granted with the
assistance of computer-assisted dispatch. But the ability to send the
right personnel (police, fire service, or medical) with pertinent
information on the medical condition of an injured civilian is a
specialized task. With the assistance of ProQA EMD software,
dispatchers utilize automated tools to provide immediate patient
assessment. During the course of an emergency medical call, ProQA
guides dispatchers through the process of collecting the vital
information from the caller, obtaining the patient’s status, choosing
an appropriate dispatch level, and instructing the caller with
medically approved protocols until the dispatched units arrive at the
scene.
Grand Prairie’s EMDs are trained and certified by the
National Academies of Emergency Dispatch to utilize state-of-the-art
EMD software. But very close to every dispatcher in the Communication
Center is a rather large, laminated flip chart version of the same
system. The center supervisors agree that their personnel often score
better during certification tests with the computer rather than the
paper. While the computer version is certainly more efficient, a piece
of paper never loses power during a thunderstorm and thus dispatchers
are trained to use both.
Online Reporting for Civilians
One
of the most recent additions to the Tiburon software and to the Grand
Prairie Police Department as a whole is the implementation of the Desk
Officer Reporting System (DORS) by Coplogic. DORS is an online
“citizen-to-police” reporting system designed to document incidents,
collect valuable data and reduce the costs associated with officers
taking reports.
According to Scheitle, “We are trying to make
the department more efficient, working with the citizens, instead of
them having to coming to us they, can do things online. The citizens
can a file a report online, we review it, and once we accept the
reports, it automatically uploads them to the Tiburon system. It saves
clerks time having to enter the report, it saves officer’s time not
having to take the report.” A final point about this implementation is
the increase in the quality of the data gathered from reports taken in
this manner. Instead of an officer filing a report based on what he
learned from a field interview, the actual complainant creates the
report using a simple interface reducing a level of separation from the
source to report.
An evidence and property bar coding system
is also a component of Grand Prairie’s Tiburon system. The system
allows the department to do complete and instant inventory of
everything in the property room, which has reduced the number of lost
property claims.
“Integrate Everything…”
While
the deployment of technology clearly can support the operation of a
growing communication center, the deployment of any technology for the
sake of having something new or the deployment of components that
simply don’t work with one another is a recipe for frustration, if not
disaster. To avoid these common mistakes, specific measures have been
taken to ensure compatibility and compliance of individual software
packages before the purchase and installation. “We try to integrate
everything we purchase in Grand Prairie as an integrated tool where the
users just have to pull up one application to get to all the other
information.”
An example of this theory put into practice is
the upcoming deployment of the Grand Prairie’s mug shot system, which
will also be integrated into the Tiburon software. Booking photos are
historically the domain of the jail and a jail computer or system. But
with a system-wide commitment to making the right information available
to the right people at the right time, booking photographs will be
accessible at various points along the system. Scheitle said, “If an
officer pulls up a jail record or an incident report and we have a
photo of that person on file, he can display that photo too. They don’t
have to go to two separate systems.”
Going Mobile
A
final example of the application of the Tiburon system is the
deployment of mobile units. Many agencies find themselves in the middle
ground when it comes to the deployment of mobile technology. Some
smaller, well-heeled departments have robust integrated video systems
that allow real-time video from units in the field to be shared with a
command center, a few can even share between the units themselves.
Agencies on the other end of the spectrum still rely primarily on radio
communication to access state and federal databases like NCIS.
Through
their mobile units, Grand Prairie Officers can do nearly everything in
the field that they can do in their offices. In stark contrast to the
citizen’s online reporting program, which could be argued reduces
officer contact with the citizenry, the ability to complete office
tasks in the field with the deployment of good mobile systems makes
personnel more productive, keeps them readily available for dispatch,
and increases their effectiveness as a criminal deterrent.
On
the effectiveness of the new systems in the field, Scheitle said, “They
can pull up their reports in the field. They can do their reports in
the field. They can look at mug shot pictures in the field. Almost
anything they can do in the office they can do out there now. We keep
them on the street a little longer.”
With the recent growth
and development experienced in Grand Prairie and the greater
Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, patrol and traffic officers are pressed to
keep pace with the all of the new housing additions and street names.
With the integration of the GIS and mapping into their mobile units,
they can now pull up maps to their calls for service including
directions and road closings and traffic.
The New Facility
After
35 years in a building that was developed for a department consisting
of 60 employees and a much smaller civilian populace, the city of Grand
Prairie is in the process of building a new facility. The new facility
will be a public safety building housing the communication and command
offices for both police and fire services. With the new facility comes
a new communication center, which will once again be upgraded to newer
servers running newer versions of Grand Prairie’s current CAD/RMS
software and related applications.
By many standards, the
Grand Prairie Police Department could be considered a small agency, yet
it faces many of the same issues and calls for service of a large
metropolitan department. Undoubtedly, the number of calls for service
will continue to increase, and with those calls will likely come
additional duties for the Communication Center such as online services
and other support demands. But the city and agency administration
officials have shown a clear commitment to invest in the appropriate
technologies and, more important, they have shown an obvious dedication
to their communication personnel.
Thomas
M. Manson is the owner of Police Technical LLC and the technology
editor for LAW and ORDER magazine. He speaks nationally on technology
and law enforcement. He can be reached at tmanson@ policetechnical.com.
