hated reports. He was, however, worried about their superiors,
the first sergeants and watch commanders, who had, for as long as
anyone could remember, approved the written reports. A new
reporting system, by taking them out of the loop, threatened their
authority. They would resist the changes down the line.
Kleinknecht, who displays great sensitivity to police culture, was
not unaware of this danger.
George did
not just have to worry about his uniformed colleagues. Julius
Turner did not much like the idea of a new system either. Yet,
because he was in charge of data systems, Turner was absolutely
central to the plan's success. Kleinknecht thought Turner and
others in administration worried that they would be blamed if the
system did not work. "They also saw it as the first time that they
had a great big project over which they did not have control. Field
officers, patrol officers, would control it. It wasn't within their
division and wouldn't help out their division."
Kleinknecht
let Turner know that he was being held responsible for the system's
success. Yet, while "might made right" in the paramilitary
atmosphere of the police department, George understood
instinctively that it could not prevail alone. Even with
Kleinknecht's authority behind the new system, George still had to
sell Turner and his staff on the idea.
He might not
have been able to pull off the assignment had it not been for the
third person on the working committee, Jeff Muel, a programmer, and
in George's words, "a 21-year-old workaholic and computer whiz,
very creative, very hard-working." The committee would make
decisions one day, and Muel would produce an application the
next.
NINETY–FIVE PERCENT
PERSPIRATION
One of
George's colleagues was cleaning out his desk in the middle of 1989
when he came across some Polaroid photographs—a memento of
the days when CARE was being developed. So tense were relations
between the project and the data systems division that when the
group agreed on an important aspect of the plan, their agreement
was written on a large chart sheet, signed by all involved, and
photographed so that none of the participants could change or back
out of the terms.
Finally,
between bureaucratic battles, a plan was developed; it was the
essence of simplicity. A patrol officer called in his report of a
crime to a specially trained operator who, working off a checklist
of questions developed for that particular offense, talked the
officer through the report, entering the data on her computer. The
victim of the crime, or a witness to it, could be put on the line
to contribute additional information. Moreover, civilians with
complaints could also make them over the telephone; thus, for less
severe offenses, the department no longer had to dispatch an
officer and a car to take the complaint and make the
report.