Take that, Poughkeepsie criminals.
Congressman Maurice Hinchey (D-Kingston) recently announced that the Poughkeepsie City Police Department has been awarded a $323,587 federal grant to improve its record system for tracking and monitoring violent crimes. The funds, which will be administered by the Department of Justice, will go toward upgrading the police’s Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD) to run on a Microsoft Platform (MSP).
“These funds will help the members of the Poughkeepsie Police Department do their job much more efficiently and effectively,” Hinchey said in a statement. “It’s critical that our law enforcement agencies have access to the new technology that is available to monitor and crack down on crimes. This federal grant will also spare Poughkeepsie taxpayers from having to pay for this important new crime tracking system.”
Poughkeepsie Chief of Police Ronald Knapp said the new system will be much more user-friendly.
“A department like ours has over 100 users,” said Knapp. “The new system will help people catch on quicker. It will help the training process as well because people are more familiar with a Windows environment. It will be much easier to move data around, things like warrants, case files and traffic tickets.”
The Poughkeepsie police have been working with an automated system since 1999, just one year after the county also made the conversion. Now, the city will be following in the county’s footsteps yet again.
“The county is going through the changeover now to MSP,” said Knapp. “We won’t do ours until they’re complete. We’ll let them work out the bugs. It’s still a massive project for us, but it simplifies things a bit.”
Knapp said that one of the major advantages of waiting for the county to finish its conversion is all of the data that can simply be transferred from the county’s computers to the city’s system. “There’s a lot of data we can copy instead of spending hours generating the data. For instance, they’ll already have the (city) maps in place.”
Knapp estimates it will be about one year before the city begins the project and it will take another year after that to implement the MSP.
“When the feds award a grant, you have to wait for the contracts to come in,” he said. “You have to meet with the software people. There’s a lot of pre-work involved.”
The MSP will also allow partner agencies to access data in order to better facilitate intelligence-led policing with an eye toward decreasing violent crime in the area. “This is such a major enhancement,” said Knapp. “It costs a lot of money because it’s such a big change. We’re fortunate to receive the money because the grants are always very competitive. There are almost always more requests than there is money available. It’s a big plus for the city.”
Knapp also said that it helps to have the government on the Poughkeepsie’s side.
“At some point we would have had to do it anyway,” he said. “But now it has a smaller impact on the city taxpayer. (Congressman Hinchey) used his influence to assist us. We were lucky to have him lobby on our behalf.”