Police get new fleet of cars, Y2K-safe dispatch system

By Jeff Kearns

Councilmembers signed off on about $700,000 worth of new equipment for the Los Gatos Police Department April 5, including a fleet of patrol cars, a Y2K-compliant computer system for dispatchers, and a high density storage system for the department's cramped offices.

The department is set to start taking delivery of 12 new Ford Crown Victorias next month, to replace the 12 Chevy cruisers it bought in 1995.

The total price tag is $356,690.

Six of the old patrol cars will be handed over to the Community Service Officers and Volunteers in Policing programs, and one will be outfitted for use as the new canine unit vehicle. The rest of the patrol cars and the old CSO/VIP cars will be sold off.

Unlike the old Caprice Classics, however, the new Fords will be straight gas burners. The old cruisers, which were retrofitted with conversion kits to run on either unleaded or compressed natural gas, ran fine, but officers complained they had a tendency to break down often.

Los Gatos gets the new cars through the state, which buys hundreds of cars in bulk from a single automaker every year to be resold to local agencies.

The cars, which will also have a new black-and-white paint scheme, instead of just white, should start hitting the streets sometime in late May or early June.

The department's six-year-old Computer Aided Dispatch and Records Management System hardware and software will also be replaced.

Some of the components date back to the '70s, and aren't Y2K compliant, but the new system will bring the department up to state of the art, says Chief Larry Todd.

The whole system will cost $304,120, but that's about half of what the department paid for the old system in 1993.

The town got a lucky break on the upgrade when it made a request to bring the old system up to Y2K standards. When the supplier, Tiburon Inc., asked its customers if they wanted the upgrade, Los Gatos was the only one that placed an order.

Instead of upgrading the software, Tiburon sold the town a new system at a $128,079 discount. The hardware gets an upgrade, too: from an HP3000 minicomputer to two IBM RISC/6000 servers.

"In the long run, we're going to be far better off than if we had made the modifications," Todd says. "It's going to be far more user-friendly."

Instead of running only one at a time on the old text-based system, dispatchers will be able to run up to four operations at once with a graphical interface.

The system will handle a database of 911 calls covering the last six years, which the new software can cross-reference with incoming calls and generate reports from the database.

And to deal with a chronic space crunch in the department offices, movable storage shelves will be installed, increasing storage capacity for evidence files by about 40 percent. Some evidence will still be stored off-site, but more recent files will be moved back to the station.

Much of the evidence is stored off-site, and officers must drive to the storage facility several times a week to retrieve or store them.

"We're so maxed-out it's unbelievable," Todd says.

The movable shelves will cost $30,687.

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