"And the cops hated it. My first sergeant would circle all the
misspelled words with a red pen, so you had to do them over."
Having once
borrowed and adapted an automated system from another police
department, Kleinknecht and his staff tried to follow the same
strategy with report writing. The Colonel identified police
departments that were said to be working on improvements in this
area, and he sent George and Julius Turner, the civilian in charge
of data systems, out shopping. "We visited maybe six or seven
police agencies trying to find a system we could buy," George
recalled. "We couldn't find one we wanted. The problem was that
they were vendor-dependent. A computer firm would set up a program
then go out of business."
At least the
trips showed George and Turner what not to look for in a system.
"They all had problems," George said. One city had a system that
wasn't really automated. Another had a backlog of 300,000 police
reports that had not yet been entered into the machines. "They must
have had 100 to 150 terminals with people behind them sitting there
and doing their fingernails. I think they had a management problem.
Cops could use the system or not. It was optional." The city with
the best system was using reputable hardware, but its software had
been produced by a company that had gone out of business. "No one
in-house knew the system," George said. "So when it broke down, it
stayed that way a long time."
DO IT
YOURSELF
The two men
returned to report that no other city's system suited their needs;
if the department wanted a new computerized report entry system, it
had to create the system itself. Turner had gotten estimates, and
the cost was "astronomical." And yet their recommendation to
Kleinknecht was, "if he still wanted to do it, we would have to
write the programs ourselves. This would have the benefit of giving
people ownership of the system and knowing it well enough to fix it
when it broke."
Lack of
appropriate technology was not the only problem George and
Kleinknecht faced. "There is a long tradition of written reports in
policing," George said. That tradition stretches back to the
English constabulary, on which American police forces were based.
Citizen-constables kept journals in which they recorded events that
occurred on their night rounds. While Kleinknecht
could—indeed, would—order the new reporting system into
being, George knew that he would be the one who would have to sell
it to his fellow police officers if they were actually to use it.
"Police are tremendously bound to tradition," he said. In this
effort, he employed two weapons: time and unceasing attention to
detail.
George wasn't
worried about patrol officers, who, under Kleinknecht, had become
the backbone of the department. He sensed that they would welcome
whatever released them from having to write those