Published: August 08, 2008 11:13 am            

Emergency vehicles now equipped with laptops

By Kelly Young

kyoung@jacksonvilleprogress.com

Thanks to a $65,000 homeland security grant received by the city this year, the Jacksonville fire and police departments have been able to outfit many of their vehicles with laptops and a new computer system this week.

Officials with both departments say the new computers mark a significant step forward in their technological capabilities and will improve efficiency while allowing them to operate more safely.

Ten of the police department’s patrol cars have been rigged with the laptops, and the fire department has placed the new equipment in five of their vehicles — the ladder truck, both fire engines, the fire marshal’s vehicle and the fire chief’s vehicle.

“Having a laptop in the car with the officers will literally save them hours of time. Now our officers have to come back to the station to file a report — with these, they will be able to do their reports in the field,” Police Chief Reece Daniel said. “With laptops every time they pull in, it will download the entire updated Cardinal database. So when they pull someone over, they will have up-to-date information so they can check and find out if we’ve handled that person before.”

Daniel said having the new information available immediately will make conducting traffic stops much safer for his officers.

“Officers won’t have to wait to get information from the dispatchers; they will be able to see it in real-time, and that will absolutely increase the degree of safety the officers have while making a stop,” he said. “Plus, I think it may result in us increasing the number of people we are able to pick up on warrants.”

While JPD was able to purchase nine computer systems with their portion of the grant, $40,000, they also received a $3,000 donation from the Citizen’s Police Academy which allowed them to purchase the final laptop.

Brent Smith, JFD fire marshal, said the laptops put information at his fingertips which could potentially save lives during an emergency.

“This puts everything in our laps. We’ve had pre-fire plans on hard copy at the station for years, and now we will have access to those plans available to us at the scene — which gives us vital information as to the contents of the building,” Smith said. “It lets us know the layout of the building, what type of hazards will be in there, where the key components for fire and life safety are, where the electrical, gas and water shut offs are, where the sprinklers are and a lot more — it is going to make things a whole lot safer for the responders.”

Fire Chief Rodney Kelley said he believes the new system will allow firefighters and police officers easy access to information they would otherwise have to get from dispatch, greatly reducing dispatch’s workload.

He said with the economy suffering as it is, it’s great for the city to have been able to make these improvements without spending any of the citizens’ tax money. The homeland security grant did not require Jacksonville to put up any matching funds in order to qualify for it.

“Things are definitely tough right now. When you are dealing with very tight budgets and unfunded mandates from the state, we’re glad to get any help we can get,” Kelley said. “This is a new avenue of technology which will allow us to improve our service to the citizens, and the more we are able to make improvements like this through grants, the less we have to ask for in the city’s budget.”

Daniel said the new computer system provides a stable platform from which future advancements can be made.

“You can over-do yourself with technology to the point where it bogs you down, so we have been taking baby steps in order to avoid that. We hope to be able to continue to make improvements through grants so we can move forward without getting the taxpayer’s money involved,” he said. “This is quite a step forward from what we have had, and I’m pretty excited about it.”

        

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