Published August 02 2010
Cop tech: Police gear goes from ink to in synch
By: Dave Roepke, INFORUM
When Mike Reitan began his career as a cop in 1983, the tools of the trade were mostly ink-based: reports clacked out on office typewriters, a pen for note-taking and smudgy fingerprints rolled out on pads.
The technology police did have was straightforward.
“The radio I used had four buttons on it,” said Reitan, now the assistant police chief in West Fargo.
Policing revolves around the digital these days, with officers able to collect more data, access more records and share more information than ever – often from behind the wheel of a patrol vehicle.
“It really is one thing after another,” said Moorhead Lt. Tory Jacobson. “The squad cars are turning into little offices.”
West Fargo showed off an upgrade in gadgetry last week: a squad car-mounted system used since late June to capture and run a check on the license plates of every vehicle it passes.
“It’s simply amazing,” Reitan said.
Plate scanners aren’t the only technology used by area law enforcement that seem ripped from the pages of a spy-movie screenplay. From a soon-to-debut GPS system that links all metro officers in real time to anti-graffiti sensors that detect spray paint, the technology area police use is growing.
Plate scanner
The main purpose of the automatic plate scanner is nabbing a stolen vehicle or a wanted person, as photos taken of license plates are run against a national list compiled by the FBI and updated twice a day.
Reitan said the database can be updated locally to help find missing persons and aid local investigations or other situations. No matter how fast the vehicles are going, the system works, he said. The range is 100 feet tops, though bad weather can reduce the range.
No stolen cars or wanted suspects have been located yet, but Reitan said its use in a burglary case shows it has broad applications. Police are able to access all plates recorded, which helped to disprove a suspect’s claim that his car hadn’t left his garage all day, Reitan said.
Reitan said only serious local cases, felonies only, will call for using the plate reader to seek local suspects, though jurisdictions in big cities have employed them for offenses as minor as unpaid parking tickets.
“You could scan the entire Walmart parking lot in a couple of minutes by just driving up and down the lanes,” said Officer Pete Nielsen.
A visual confirmation is needed before initiating a traffic stop, as the scanner can generate false positives because it determines the numbers and letters of a plate but not the state.
Officer Tyler Williams said the scanner had a hit like that last week when a Minnesota plate came up as stolen because the same plate number was reported stolen in Wisconsin.
Reitan said West Fargo police will consider buying a second scanner next year if it proves useful. It’s the first one in use in North Dakota, but other area departments have also looked at the plate readers.
“We’ve certainly studied them, and I’m impressed,” Jacobson said.
Gadgets galore
Plate scanners aren’t the only new gizmos area cops have at their disposal.
Fargo police are using a sensor called the Merlin Graffiti Detection System that helps track and apprehend vandals, Lt. Pat Claus said.
According to information from the manufacturer, the Merlin system detects the audio signatures of spray paints and can be wired to an alarm or a camera.
“Yes, the Fargo police department does have technology like that and has since the beginning of summer,” Claus said.
Claus wouldn’t say where the sensors are located or how they’ve functioned.
“A lot of value is in not advertising the technology,” he said.
Audio and video recorders are essential tools in investigations – drug cases, for instance – and Claus said those recorders are getting smaller while improving in quality. Some transmitters are as small as a thumb, he said. That’s also allowed bicycle police in Moorhead to use in-ear radios, Jacobson said.
The shrinking trend also applies to bulkier technology. New versions of the thermal imagers used for several years – devices that help police see in the dark by measuring heat signatures – have shrunk from camcorder-sized to the size of binoculars, said Claus, who heads Fargo’s investigations unit and is also commander of the Fargo-Moorhead SWAT team.
New devices have often taken the place of low-tech alternatives.
As stun guns became a required addition to cops’ belts, batons are no longer mandated, and ink pads are no longer as essential due to the advent of the electronic fingerprint scanners in use in West Fargo and at the jails in Cass and Clay counties, Reitan said.
Better software
A standard patrol car is chock-full of technology: a laptop computer, video and audio recorders and even a printer – Moorhead’s cars are being outfitted with a printer stored inside of the passenger-seat headrest.
Though it may not sound as gee-whiz as new gadgets, one of the most important innovations for area law enforcement will debut Aug. 29, making the laptop computers in those cars even more functional.
All the agencies using the Red River Regional Dispatch Center are switching to a record management system called New World, which will replace a text-based “green screen” program with a system based in Windows that will give each department full access to each other’s records.
“It’s going to connect the dots that we might have had to seek out before,” Jacobson said.
As part of the New World system, every officer in the area will be able to see where all on-duty officers are, said Capt. Tod Dahle, who worked on the conversion planned since 2006.
That should be a big help in pursuits or in cases where police are offering mutual aid outside of their own cities, Jacobson said.
Dahle said while he can understand why some cops may think there’s “an air of Big Brother” with the constant tracking, he does not think it’ll be an issue.
“If they’re doing the job they’re paid to do, they’re never going to have to worry about that,” he said.
At what price?
A big drawback to better technology is the cost. The plate reader, for example, cost $28,000, Reitan said. It was paid for with a $10,000 state grant and $18,000 raised through seizures in drug cases, he said.
The New World project has a $3.8 million price tag, but a federal community policing grant covered $3 million, Dahle said.
Not being first in line for heralded advancements is one way to keep technology from busting the budget, Jacobson said.
“You want to be on the leading edge but not the bleeding edge,” he said.
Police also like to try new software and gear before buying, and companies are willing to give a trial run.
For example, Fargo police are testing a software program to improve their crime tracking, allowing the data to be sliced in far greater detail and increasing their mapping abilities, Claus said. But they haven’t signed a contract yet.
“They’re still letting us play with it,” he said.
Reitan said he looked at plate readers for years before deciding they were worth it. Now he’s doing the same with yet another scanner, this one a handheld device that could ID a person via face-recognition software and DNA.
“That’s still a ways down the road,” he said.