Cleveland is spending $18 million to replace obsolete public safety radios and update police dispatch and records technology.
The overhauls include an early warning program to monitor how police officers use force – a requirement of the city’s nine-year-old consent decree with the U.S. Justice Department.
City Council approved the expenditures at its July meeting on Wednesday.
Cleveland’s current stock of radios date to 2012 and are no longer supported by the manufacturer, said Larry Jones, the deputy commissioner for public safety IT.
“Think about having a cell phone from 2012 and using it today to do your day to day business,” Jones told council members Wednesday.
The new portable radios work more like smartphones than walkie-talkies. Officers will be able receive dispatch alerts on the devices. The radios also use GPS to track officers’ locations. The city is buying 1,840 radios for police officers, firefighters, EMS workers and animal control staff at a cost of $13 million.
Council also approved $4.25 million for a new computer-aided dispatch and records management system. The improvements will cut down the officers’ paperwork, Jones said. Police will also be able to issue digital tickets rather than the paper ones they currently write.
“Believe it or not, there’s a lockbox,” Jones said, “and somebody goes district to district picking up paper tickets, bringing them down to the Justice Center.”
As part of the dispatch updates, Cleveland will plug in to the Chagrin Valley Dispatch system. The move would allow Cleveland police to share information more easily with other participants in the network, which includes 31 suburbs, the Metroparks and the Cuyahoga County Sheriff.
Another $300,000 will support the early intervention program. Cleveland’s 2015 consent decree requires the city to track a host of statistics on officers, including sick time usage, discipline, vehicle pursuits and uses of force.
The goal of the program is “to intervene before discipline is required,” the consent decree says. The system is meant to do more than track potentially bad behavior, however, according to Police Accountability Team Executive Director Leigh Anderson.
“This system will basically be able to regularly help improve officer performance,” she told council. “But I also want to state that it will also capture good performance.”
The remaining $450,000 will go toward project management costs. The city has the money to spend on the new equipment and programs thanks to unexpectedly high income tax receipts and other revenue this year, Finance Director Ahmed Abonamah told council.
