LIHUE — The Kauai Police Department is going to get a new 911 and records management system, which brings with it a $2.3 million price tag. The money will come from the state of Hawaii’s Enhanced 911 Board, which provided
LIHUE — The Kauai Police Department is going to get a new 911 and records management system, which brings with it a $2.3 million price tag.
The money will come from the state of Hawaii’s Enhanced 911 Board, which provided the money for the department’s last upgrade in 2007. That E911 system boasted new features like the ability to pinpoint the origination of the 911 call with GPS.
That fund is fueled by the 66-cent surcharge applied to the wireless phone bills of all Hawaii residents.
“It’s important for the public to know that everyone that has a phone pays,” said Council Chair Mel Rapozo. “You see it on your phone bill and it goes into a big account and we use those funds to work on our 911 system.”
Rob Gausepohl, assistant chief of the Administrative and Technical Bureau, said one month after the 2007 system purchase, the vendor was bought out, and since then, KPD hasn’t received the systems support that was promised when the original contract was signed.
“We’ve had problems with the existing vendor and we have this fantastic opportunity to move to a vendor that does support their software,” Gausepohl said. “Right now, we’re not able to do things that we need to do with the system and it’s not working as we’d like.”
Gausepohl said the system doesn’t work in a mobile environment and that extracting records can be time-consuming.
“Getting information out of this product is extremely difficult,” Gausepohl said. “It takes hours and hours to extract statistical data and this new product, we’ve seen it — it’s a far superior product.”
The new product, named the Public Safety Answering Point software suite, includes an integrated Computer Aided Dispatch system, a Computer Aided Mobile system, and a Records Management System — all on one platform.
“In the system we have now, the components aren’t on one platform so it is slow and difficult,” Gausepohl said. “No software is perfect, but we’re quite confident that this is the best we can do.”
In order to ensure that past mistakes aren’t repeated, Gausepohl said the department has set up payment milestones with the new vendor.
“The payment milestones are based on performance, so they have to perform and then we pay them,” Gausepohl said. “We don’t want to repeat this mistake and I don’t want that to be my legacy.”
Councilwoman JoAnn Yukimura said she’s grateful for the research that the department’s administration put into the system this time around.
“We paid a million (dollars) for a system that never worked,” Yukimura said. “We need to put safeguards in place and understand what went wrong in order to not repeat errors.”
