Law Enforcement Technology

MAR 2015

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TECHNOLOGY ON PATROL 18 Law Enforcement Technology March 2015 www.officer.com T he City of West Covina, California, located ap- proximately 20 miles east of Los Angeles, is home to 110,000 residents spread over a 16-square mile service area. Surrounded by the cities of Covina, Elmonte and Baldwin Park, West Covina is not what you would think of when referring to the epicenter of state-of-the-art technology. W hen you meet the Chief of Police in West Covina, Dave Faulkner, you immediately feel his passion for his agency, officers and the people of the city he serves. Faulkner has been a cop for 32 years and worked in many roles—in both uniformed and special purpose units. Faulkner is also a certi- fied helicopter pilot, which is where I first met him in the fall of 2013 when he was the head of the Fontana, Calif. Police Air Support Unit. He was a pioneer then, assisting Fontana in the planning, establishment and ongoing development of their Air Support Unit that also serves the California cities of Rialto and Redlands. Realizing a need After being appointed West Covina's Chief of Police in 2014, Faulkner again found himself in a situation where his knowledge of available technology and how to implement it into a law enforcement agency was put to the test. Faulkner speaks very proudly of the achievements of the West Covina Service Group, an internal department on wheels Command How West Covina, Calif. PD graduated from an '87 Winnebago to a state-of-the-art incident command unit within the agency that focuses specifi- cally on technology, more specifically, technology made for the officers who use them. Back in 1985 a West Covina Police captain made the suggestion to upper command that it would be nice to capture all police department records and investigation files on active cases on a computer system, to eliminate the need to go through the complicated process of trying to locate a file that was often housed in a specific detec- tive's filing cabinet. This one single comment led to the development of what would become a program police officers, dispatchers and detectives now use a variation of worldwide on a daily basis. The records management system (RMS) was originally planned as a database solution to house digital files compiled by detectives during investi- gations, but quickly morphed into the addition of a computer aided dispatch (CAD) system as a combined prod- uct offering technology that not only assisted detectives, but could now also assist officers on the street, and proved an even a more effective method of dispatching officers to active calls for service. Even though CAD is offered by many different vendors today, with each having slightly different interfaces and functionality to the end user, ultimately, all of these systems are still providing officers the ability to check criminal records from patrol cars, dispatchers keep track of calls for service, detectives to keep case notes, evidence files, photos and other relevant information in a paperless By Ryan Mason

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