Back to Old School

**Cidp24** · 12-01-09, 08:43 PM

Our department is going through a major systems upgrade tomorrow. MOBILE, CAD, JAIL, INCIDENT, and COURT are all tied in together under one program, so for about 6 hours tomorrow everything will revert to the old way.... a pen and a sheet of paper.

No MDTs, computer aided dispatch, no computerized booking, hand written reports, and Lord knows what Court Services/Records is going to do. When the updates are finished, all the hand written stuff has to be entered.
This is going to be interesting. I think I have my divisions ready to go but we'll see.

**Jenna** · 12-01-09, 08:45 PM

Good luck! Now all your elementary school penmanship lessons will finally pay off!

**CTR man** · 12-01-09, 08:48 PM

Your guys won't have to call in for your calls or stand by your cell phones, will you?

I hope that your heads don't hurt by the end of the day.

**lewisipso** · 12-01-09, 09:31 PM

How many people will be lost as a goose?

**Jenna** · 12-01-09, 09:33 PM

Originally Posted by lewisipso

How many people will be lost as a goose?

The youngest ones might not know how to use a pen!

**Cidp24** · 12-01-09, 09:36 PM

Originally Posted by lewisipso

How many people will be lost as a goose?

All but me and about 3 others out of about 40 people.

**Twan007** · 12-01-09, 10:21 PM

wow... I would flip out... literally...

I'd probably have to call in sick or something... "sarge... sorry, i can't come in today... got a case of anal glaucoma - I can't see my ass doing that"

and in case some of you take me seriously...

**tapout** · 12-01-09, 10:25 PM

yeah, how about just not doing any self initiated patrol for 6 hours. respond to emergency calls for service and do nothing else. hope its a slow day. good luck.

**121Traffic** · 12-02-09, 01:23 AM

We had that a couple months back. I was on day shift. It was awful, and it lasted a couple of DAYS. No CAD, so we were using mapbooks to get around some of the new residentials. All reports were looged on special incident sheets. They were pretty good since they were made up in advance of the coming outage. Checkboxes that correllate directly to the drop box menus on the computer. We typed our narratives in Word. Had to book people on handwritten custodies, and take digital photos with a patrol evidence camera with the suspect holding up an old school white board with the case number, their name, etc. We were fortunate in that we turned in all the handwritten report face sheets and custodies to Records Division to enter once the system came up, and we just saved our narratives to our network drives. Once the system was up, we just copied and pasted the narratives into the computer face sheets. Pretty slick.

Only thing I hated was not having Mobile CAD. It wasn't hard for ME to operate for a few days without CAD...my first PD didn't have MDTs for the 1st year I worked there. I cut my teeth in 2004 learning to police with a notepad to write the info down as it was aired, a mapbook, and a hundred-block sheet. I was okay. Other newer coppers who have NEVER operated radio-only (my current PD has had CAD-enabled MDTs for a long time), some with more time on at my current PD (but less total street time than me), were driving me bonkers, asking dispatch to repeat locations, suspect descriptions, tag numbers, etc. Over and over! Literally one cop would ask them to repeat it (for the third time since the original aired call), and two minutes later ANOTHER would ask them to air the same shit AGAIN. Write shit down people!

**mack** · 12-02-09, 06:25 AM

The department I worked for did that in 2000, we were running around crazy for about a week while they installed, upgraded etc, etc, etc... For about a year and a half afterwards we would intermittently go blackout at unexpected times due to system failures. Basically IT didn't know exactly what they were doing wrong. Boy was it fun getting OT to update the hand written reports into the computer

**Second Chance** · 12-02-09, 08:17 AM

Every once in a while our system will go down, in fact Monday we lost everything for a few hours. No CAD even our aircards were not working, so we couldn't get into anything, everything was pen and paper....................

**Jks9199** · 12-02-09, 09:51 AM

Even with CAD, we've got officers who need to have their calls repeated. (And we've got a few who need to learn to be CONCISE with their radio traffic... and to listen to what they are told, and not hear something different... but those are different discussions!)

We went to one vendor's product for CAD/RMS, and after a year of problems, we "mutually decided not to complete the project." Back to paper for about a year... We're on a new product, and after a bit more than a year -- it's not perfect, but it ain't all bad, either. Seems to be up and running pretty reliably, though we still have problems figuring out how to do somethings because we learned when we started that we hadn't been doing some record-keeping properly. For more than a decade. And, being a small agency, we don't have the luxury of a large records staff to "fix" the numbers from what our guys do... so they've got to do the stats stuff right.

**Cidp24** · 12-02-09, 02:56 PM

Well a file blew during the beginning of the upgrade and we have been down since about 05:00 with no end in sight. They say that it is probable that the blown file also caused the loss of all warrants, even the backups. If they cant recover that, warrants dating back to the late 80s to present will have to be re-entered. Four 24" deep file cabinets packed with hard copies, somewhere around 1000 or so, taking a wild guess.

Yee-haw.

**Jenna** · 12-02-09, 02:58 PM

Ouch! That beach retirement must be looking increasingly desirable.

Hope they can recover the files.

**Cidp24** · 12-02-09, 03:00 PM

Heck yea. I'm just glad I don't have anything to do with warrant entry.

**Bama512** · 12-02-09, 05:30 PM

Some of you guys don't realize how fortunate you are with all of the technology. We still have to do reports by hand or come back to the station to type them up on a computer, print and file them in the Chief's inbox. Our computers were installed this year, but just for tickets - no CAD or NCIC, just polls a state ran database that isn't updated as fast. No AVL either.

We are getting caught up though, we have digital video cameras in the cars now. I got the radar interface cable put on mine.

**doubs** · 12-02-09, 06:09 PM

my first dept. did everything by hand, all reports, then we turn them in and we had data entry clerks that would enter the reports on the computer. My second department you had to come to the station to do your reports on the computer. My current job has computers in most of the vehicles, no cad in it though, only reporting software.

**mavriktu** · 12-03-09, 08:07 AM

We still have to go to the office to type or reports as we have NO computers in the units.It isnt all that bad as it gives you an excuse to get to the office,relax,and grab a cup of coffee.The only time we had a real problem was after Katrina,we were out of everything for over 2 months,we would go to a call ,take brief notes and move on

The narratives on some were funny after that much time had elapsed,most went something like this:---In the aftermathh of Hurricane Katrina,complaintant requested a report of criminal damage to property.This is it."--------<<<and that is a fact and no joke.