In recent months, we’ve heard plenty of talk about how to stem the city’s crime rate—foot patrols, gang crackdowns, street-corner security cameras. Maybe these measures will work; maybe they won’t. The police, though, have a problem that goes far deeper than tactics: stone-age technology.
Let’s say you’re a San Francisco police officer investigating a liquor store holdup in the Fillmore. You know that the bad guys drove a white Toyota after the robbery, and you wonder if the same car was used in other recent crimes. Should be simple enough to find out, right?
Wrong. As things stand, you’ll need to comb the paper files, one after the other, for a mention of that white Toyota, or try to hunt it down in an antiquated database. If you’re a typical city cop, you probably won’t even have your own work e-mail address (only 8 percent do), and the computers in your section—well, they might still be running Windows 95. “It’s embarrassing to admit,” says Police Chief Heather Fong. “But sometimes we’ll get a disk and we can’t read it.”
Such is the nature of police work in the tech capital of the world, a mere 30 miles north of Dave Packard’s garage. Help may be on the way. The department launched a review of its IT needs and is drawing up a road map for a massive upgrade. A new database that will connect the police with the rest of the city-and-county justice system is already in the works. Right now, though, most of the items on the wish list are just glimmers in Chief Fong’s eye; the upgrade, whenever it comes to pass, will take a lot of money and a lot of time. But Fong believes it’s likely to result in more solved crimes as well as less overtime—a perennial sore point with city government.
Plus, it’s 2007, for God’s sake; the police should have at least as much technology at their disposal as your local coffee shop does. As Gary Delagnes, head of the Police Officers Association, puts it, “E-mail? How basic is that?”