Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
PITTSBURGH — Pittsburgh police wasted precious minutes waiting for two accurate, long-range rifles to arrive before they could match the firepower of a gunman who killed three of their comrades and injured a fourth.
Almost a year after the deadly Stanton Heights shooting, police have purchased 46 assault-style service rifles and plan to buy up to 50 more by year’s end, and 911 officials are poised to begin using a $10 million emergency dispatching system.
“April 4 brought to the forefront that there was a need for that type of weapon, and it wasn’t available,” Deputy Chief Paul Donaldson said. “We had to wait for SWAT’s arrival to do the extraction.”
Three-day training courses to use the rifles, akin to the military’s AR-15, began last month and run through November.
Donaldson expects 30 percent to 40 percent of the 910-member police force to qualify to use the rifles, which officers must sign out from police zones when they take a cruiser on patrol. About 20 have been distributed to supervisors so far, he said.
The rifles will be kept in locked boxes in police cruiser trucks and used in extreme “standoff-type” emergencies before specially trained and armed SWAT team members arrive, Donaldson said.
“You’re not going to have officers knocking on your door with a rifle slung over their shoulder,” Donaldson said.
A mistake in ordering the lockboxes delayed deployment of the rifles, he said. Foam padding inside the boxes was too thick to allow storage of the rifles and their magazines, so they had to be reordered.
Delays in ordering the rifles’ electronic scopes and muzzles -- used during training exercises to reduce noise -- made the process “longer than we would have liked,” Donaldson said.
The rifles likely will phase out use of police shotguns. In his 35 years of experience, Donaldson said only one suspect was shot and killed with a bureau-issued shotgun. He expects the rifles to see similarly limited use.
“It will give us much more firepower than what we possess now,” Donaldson said.
New weapons aren’t the only upgrades intended to improve police officer safety.
Allegheny County’s 911 center this month will begin training 250 dispatchers and call-takers on a $10 million computer-aided dispatch system from California-based Tiburon Inc., said Bob Full, chief of Allegheny County Emergency Services.
The overhaul will replace separate city- and county-based systems that are 20 and 11 years old, respectively, and allow police cruisers equipped with computer terminals to use the system’s “silent dispatch” option, Full said.
That means a 911 dispatcher can send information about an emergency call to a police officer without using public airwaves accessible to anyone with a police-band scanner, including those who intend to harm police.
For the first time, dispatchers will be able to see a real-time map of where GPS-equipped police cars, fire trucks and ambulances are in Allegheny County. If a police officer, for example, stops responding on his or her radio, dispatchers can quickly determine an officer’s last location.
“Time means a big difference in saving somebody’s life,” Full said.
The system will have more memory to store a history of 911 calls from addresses in its database, Full said, but he wasn’t sure how far back its history could go.
The computer system is scheduled to be activated Aug. 8.
“We really do believe that it will contribute greatly to additional officer safety,” Full said.
Improving officer safety has been one of the 911 center’s most pressing goals since April 4.
A part-time 911 call-taker failed to relay a warning to the officers about weapons in the home of Richard Poplawski, who is accused in the killings.
Since then, 911 operators have been required to question callers about weapons in homes and relay that information to responding officers, Full said.
The call-taker involved in the April 4 incident went through extensive retraining and remains employed full time at the 911 center in Point Breeze, Full said.
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