Law-enforcement technologyTight money hampers Detroit police
A non-profit data sharing consortium approached the Detroit Police Department last summer to see whether the department would like to join the consortium’s regional system and share technology that would allow the department effectively to put hundreds of officer back on to the streets. Joining the Courts and Law Enforcement Management Information System (CLEMIS) would have cost the city $1.2 million a year, which the city says it cannot afford.
A non-profit data sharing consortium approached the Detroit Police Department last summer to see whether the department would like to join the consortium’s regional system and share technology that would allow the department effectively to put hundreds of officer back on to the streets.
City officials declined to join the system despite having one of the nation’s highest murder rates, and a police force dealing with budget cuts. Joining the Courts and Law Enforcement Management Information System (CLEMIS) would have cost the city $1.2 million a year, which the city says it cannot afford.
The Detroit News reports that CLEMIS, a consortium based in Oakland County, works with 100 law enforcement agencies in the state of Michigan, covering Oakland, Macomb, Wayne, Washtenaw, and Genesee counties.
The $1.2 million price tag would cover training, access to CLEMIS records, and computer equipment and maintenance for the city’s 2,700 officers, plus assorted other items, including wireless communications and mugshot capture stations at the city’s eight precincts.
Interim Police Chief Chester Logan reinforced that joining the consortium would cost too much money.
“The DPD conducted a thorough assessment of the system, and it would be cost prohibitive for an agency of our size to utilize CLEMIS at this time,” Logan toldthe Detroit News in an e-mail. “The DPD would be willing to revisit the possibility of acquiring CLEMIS if the cost were reduced and made more affordable for the department.”
CLEMIS allows police officers to file crash reports, check a suspect’s fingerprints, and process traffic tickets and other citations through a computer in their squad cars, which gives them more time to investigate crimes and chase hardcore criminals.
“CLEMIS is like Google for cops,” retired Oakland County Sheriff’s detective David Wurtz, who works on contract with the Sheriff’s Office to instruct deputies on “cool tools” available on CLEMIS toldthe Detroit News.
Current and former Detroit police officers are confused by the decision to pass on innovations such as BlueCheck, the mobile fingerprinting ID system, which other departments in the area use.
“The CLEMIS system is great and everyone knows the DPD has always had to do more with less — truer today than ever,” said Mark Diaz, president of the Detroit Police Officers Association. “Officers want anything and everything that will help them do their jobs more efficiently — the BlueCheck would be an incredible tool.”
Former Detroit Police lieutenant, Larry Adams helped set up Detroit’s current police program and says is puzzled as to why the Detroit Police Department has not joined CLEMIS.
“Detroit officers today hardly have time to take accident reports with all the other calls for service they get,” Adams told the Detroit News. “With CLEMIS, electronic citations can be processed with the swipe of a driver’s license in two to three minutes.”
Police Chief Ralph Godbee Jr., who was the police chief in 2012, also talked about the cost being too high, as well as concerned about whether the computer aided dispatch could handle Detroit’s large number of calls for service.
“CLEMIS operating expenses are prohibitive, primarily due to the significant number of user fees the department would have to incur.” Godbee said in an August 2012 letter to Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard.
Detroit police would not say how many service calls it would receive in a year, but CLEMIS manager James Hess, said the consortium-aided dispatch system handles 2.1 million calls each year.
Keith Zeistloff, 15th District Court administrator, said joining CLEMIS made both technical and financial sense for the Ann Arbor court, which handles 20,000 citations each year.
“We work daily with the Ann Arbor Police Department, a CLEMIS member, and we wanted to join it for technical reasons,” Zeistloff told the Detroit News. “We would like to be able to extract data from police into our own court records. Currently, an employee has to manually enter information that can be inputted seamlessly through computer programs.”
