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Politics & Government

Town Police Chief Requests Tech Upgrades, Again

Southampton Town Board considers proposal to outfit police headquarters and vehicles with policing technology.

With a revised pitch, Southampton Town Police Chief William Wilson is again urging the to approve expenditures to upgrade the Police Department’s communications and record-keeping technology.

In a plan detailed to the board Friday, the town would spend $600,000 in a two-phase multi-year project, followed by $70,000 in annual maintenance fees to keep the systems licensed and operational. The board at a nearly $700,000 project proposed last year, citing the cost.

Wilson said he firmly believes the new technology with bring the Police Department “leaps and bounds forward, which we desperately need to do.” With the upgrades, police officers will spend less time filling out reports and more time interacting with the public, according to Wilson, who said that the time needed to process a typical arrest would be cut in half. The new efficiencies would come at a time when the is adjusting to having fewer personnel under .

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The new hardware and software would provide for automated ticketing and accident reports, computer-aided dispatching, and access to a comprehensive database shared by several Long Island policing agencies. Wilson said the new computer system would also eliminate duplication of efforts for keeping records.

Wilson said the department currently uses four different computer systems, none of which communicate with each other. “It’s as archaic as archaic is,” he said.

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Phase one of the proposal includes $42,000 for infrastructure and $250,000 for software costs. “What we’re looking to do with phase one is automate our headquarters facility,” Wilson told the Town Board.

Phase two, projected to be implemented in 2013 or 2014, includes $310,000 to outfit police vehicles with mobile workstations, plus software licensing. The chief promised that the Police Department will aggressively seek court administration grant money to offset the costs of phase two.

In addition to automated ticketing, Wilson said officers would be able to access from their vehicles information on suspects, vehicles and addresses — information that will make them safer.

“We deal with a tremendous amount of people who are in for the day or in for the night and out in the morning,” Wilson said of visitors to Southampton who get pulled over by the police. He provided examples of knowledge police would benefit from having at their fingertips: “Was this person arrested with a gun last week? Did they fight with the police?”

Wilson said that after looking at five or six different software vendors, he settled on Impact, the same company that supplies hardware and software to the Southampton Village Police Department, of which he was chief before .

Having worked with Impact in the past, Wilson told the Town Board that using the software to answer their questions about crime and accident patterns in 30 seconds, rather than after days with the aid of two or three staffers. “I could extract that information out of Impact almost instantaneously.”

Because Impact is part of the New York State competitive bidding system already, the town would not need to issue a request for proposals before settling on hiring the company, Wilson said.

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