By Crystal Carreon, The San Jose Mercury News
SAN JOSE -- San Jose Police Chief Rob Davis envisions a new frontier in policing: one where citizens download the latest police alerts on their PDAs, an interactive Web site shows where crimes are happening in real time, and officers electronically log reports with the touch of a few buttons.
Davis wants a police department of the 21st century. And he wants it here, in the birthplace of the silicon chip.
“We need to start breaking the doors down to lead the change,” he said after previewing a prototype of the department’s new Web site. “We’re ready, already.”
Police departments across the country -- unwilling to take on new tools because of their costs or comfort level -- have long lagged behind private industry in adopting new technologies. But Davis, who assumed command of the 1,400-officer department in late January, believes it’s high time to catch up, and eventually lead the police technology curve.
Just three months into the job, Davis has equipped every patrol officer with the newest in less-lethal technology, a 50,000-volt Taser stun gun, following similar moves in Sacramento and Phoenix.
Training has begun on Integraph, a state-of-the-art police dispatch system that uses global positioning to track officers, looking similar to a live video game playing itself out on a real-time map of San Jose. The 2-year-old technology, set to debut in mid-June, is used by a handful of police agencies, including those in San Diego and Santa Rosa.
Next month, testing will begin on a wireless reporting system that would allow officers to electronically file from the field instead of handwriting reports at the office. A patrol unit near downtown has been selected to test the software, which could be used in all patrol cars by next year, said San Jose Deputy Police Chief Randy Cooper, who supervises the Bureau of Technical Services.
And by June, the department expects to introduce its renovated home page at www.sjpd.org, which Cooper said will become one of the most useful and interactive sites in the country.
The site will include live information on police bulletins, missing persons and fugitives sought. It will also have a map of San Jose where users can view crimes in their area with a few clicks of a mouse -- similar to how citizens can already locate high-risk sex offenders by ZIP code. The Web site will also host a monthly message from the chief in English, Spanish and Vietnamese.
“Chief Davis has a vision of where we should be,” said Cooper, who has been assigned scoping out new technologies -- and finding grants to pay for them in these tough budget times. “The world has changed, and he’s adapting to the climate of change.”
Davis says he’s following a tradition of innovation and bringing the capital of Silicon Valley the high-tech policing it deserves.
The San Jose Police Department emerged as a national model of law enforcement more than a decade ago, during the era of then-chief Joseph McNamara, and it continues to be cited as an example of what works in policing the country’s safest big city.
McNamara, largely credited with shaking up the police establishment, helped bring computers to patrol cars and an advanced fingerprinting scanner to the department before his departure in 1991.
Another predecessor, Lou Cobarruviaz, computerized the police dispatch center. And William Lansdowne -- who left the department in August to become chief in San Diego -- posted the department’s first Web site.
Lansdowne also brought in a state-of-the-art computerized shooting range to address a rise in police-involved shootings. And under Lansdowne, the department conducted a review of traffic stops to see whether police were racially profiling. Davis, who was a captain at the time, designed the system used to analyze that data.
F. Wayne Barte, a senior project manager with the Office of Law Enforcement Technology Commercialization in West Virginia, said the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department appears to lead the tech curve in law enforcement, testing a battery of equipment, including a device that enables officers to see through walls.
San Jose, he said, is a pilot test site for the police electronic filing system.
“From what I’ve heard, San Jose is one of the very active agencies,” said Barte, whose agency helps introduce innovations to police departments across the country. “San Jose is an early adopter in law enforcement technology.”
But Davis is eager to have his department become an epicenter of innovation.
“Our department has still been ahead, but we have fallen behind in terms of our potential,” he said. “We need to be leading the way.”