Lost in cyber space: Cops confounded by computer glitches

Monday, October 16, 2000

By Bryn Mickle

JOURNAL STAFF WRITER

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FLINT Some police officers are saying a computer system that was supposed to take the Flint Police Department into the new millennium is instead taking officers off the streets.

In the nine months since Flint went on-linewith its second $300,000 police computer package in four years, the department has been plagued by 1,300 lost reports, security concerns, software glitches and officer frustrations.

Officers poorly trained to handle the new software say they spend too much time in front of a computer screen instead of on patrol.

A problem with incompatible software has put the city months behind a deadline for reporting state-mandated crime statistics, forcing the city to lift its overtime restrictions so it can pay clerks to re-type information.

"From what I've seen this isn't the system we need. It takes longer and a lot of the information is duplicated. It's taking officers off the road," said Virgil Blanton, president of the Flint Police Officers' Association.

Officers say the department is throwing good money after bad to fix the problems.

"They should just scrap this thing now and start over," said one Flint officer, echoing a sentiment expressed by numerous officers.

Police officials understand the frustrations but said the problems are being worked out.

"It's been frustrating and there have been a lot of things we have been unhappy about. We've let the company know that this is unacceptable," Capt. John Steele.

Steele, however, thinks the situation can improve.

"This system has the potential to be a lot better than what we had," Steele said.

The head of Fremont, Calif.-based Tiburon said the company is trying to resolve Flint's concerns.

"This is a customized system and bugs are to be expected, but I believe it is under control," Chief Executive Officer Bruce Kelling said.

Flint bought the new Tiburon computer system in March 1999 to replace a $327,000 computer system the city had purchased three years earlier from a company that subsequently went out of business.

The Tiburon program was designed to work with the city's 911 computer dispatch system and offered a host of attractive options, including crime statistic reporting and in-car software that would allow officers to file reports from their police cruisers.

But so far, critics say the software has not met expectations.

Troubles began in January when software problems pushed the planned Jan. 1 start date back to Feb. 14 - a day dubbed by some in the department as "The St. Valentine's Day Massacre."

Almost immediately, problems began to crop up.

Officers unfamiliar with the system complained they didn't know how to use it. Training sessions for some had been held months earlier and, in some cases, were canceled because computers didn't work.

The learning curve has been steep for some officers, who can take as long as two hours to enter a police report into the system.

Breakdowns have forced officers to write their reports in longhand while technicians repair glitches.

Last month it was discovered that one of the software glitches had prevented about 1,300 police reports from being forwarded to the city's detective bureau.

A discrepancy in the way reports were printed caused anywhere from five to 10 reports daily to be lost in the shuffle. Many of the reports were minor items and Steele said no serious crimes were missed by investigators.

The reports were missed because the system prints out only reports completed in the same period in which the report number was issued. Officers' reports not finished on time were not printed.

At least two officers were disciplined because they failed to submit reports before their shift ended, Steele said.

Blanton counters the reports would have been finished if the system hadn't been down when officers went to use it.

Steele said a policy change now allows officers to phone in some reports, which will limit the amount of time officers spend in front of a computer.

But Steele said officers also need to adapt to the new technology.

"Police officers don't always handle change very well," he said.

One of the biggest problems is that the Tiburon system is incompatible with the state police Michigan Incident-Based Crime Reporting software.

The lack of an automated system to download information to the state has forced Flint to manually enter reports into a separate program, creating a massive backlog.

Anywhere between 100 and 120 police reports are filed every day in Flint, and about 80 percent of those reports fall into categories required by the state reporting system.

A clerk, working with two supervisors and a couple of helpers, had managed to enter all of the April complaints by the end of September.

The department has been paying more than 20 hours in weekly overtime expenses since mid-September trying to catch up, but Steele said it is unlikely the city will meet the Dec. 31 deadline for yearly reports.

Flint isn't the only police agency using Tiburon that is having a hard time meeting those deadlines, according to state police.

Thirty other police agencies have told state police about difficulties filing crime data using the Tiburon system, state police crime analyst Amy Alderman said.

Notes in the state police database indicate the agencies are working on problems or running tests, Alderman said.

Failure to provide the state with the information could cost the city grant money, but Steele said state officials are aware of the situation and have expressed a willingness to work with Flint.

The irony of paying overtime to record old crimes while strictly limiting extra hours for officers handling fresh reports has not been lost on Steele, who said he sent a terse letter last month to Tiburon's president putting the company "on notice."

Since that letter, Steele said he has gotten a favorable response from the company. The company has fixed several glitches and indicated that they are working on others, Steele said.

"Programming errors and misunderstandings happen. It's our goal to address these issues," Kelling said.

Kelling blamed some of the state-reporting problems on the previous computer system, but said he is looking into the matter.

Bryn Mickle is the afternoon police reporter. He can be reached at (810)766-6383 or bmickle@flintjournal.com.

http://fl.mlive.com/news/index.ssf?/news/stories/20001016f15a1okcom.frm

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), October 16, 2000

Answers

I wonder how many other police organizations
have been able to keep the lid on this for 10
months. We've heard this story before from
Shrevesport to Sacramento.

-- spider (spider0@usa.net), October 16, 2000.

A system purchased 9 months before proposed implementation 0n 1 Jan 2000 to replace a 3 year old system built by a company that went out of business! And this reporter makes no connection with Y2K!! Unbelievable! But of course everyone knows that since the planet didn't explode 1.1.00, y2k was all just hype made up by the IT consultants - presumably in order to sell software like that described in the article above :)

-- clivus nondog (clivus@ibm.net), October 17, 2000.