The V.I. Police Department Thursday unveiled and began setting up a computerized risk management system to track use-of-force information, making a concrete step forward to fulfilling a major requirement of a federal consent decree imposed on the department earlier this year.
The system is an off-the-shelf program called IAPro, which is used for police data management in more than 200 police departments in the U.S., Canada and Australia, according to John Walker, vice president of IAPro. Walker, a former narcotics and organized crime officer who helps develop software for IAPro, demonstrated the program for police officers Thursday on St. Croix before holding a press conference with the department unveiling the new system to the public.
"This system helps law enforcement agencies prevent problems," Walker said. "The main focus is not on discipline but on identifying those who need assistance and get that assistance to them before it becomes a liability for the department."
Police Commissioner Novelle Francis also said the purpose of the system was to flag and address potential issues before they turned in to real problems.
"We want to solve problems before they begin to affect the department," he said. "In some cases, an officer may require some counseling, or if they are having problems, some may need to take time off work."
It will serve as a tool for officers to progress and improve too. By catching problems early and giving counseling, officers who may be beginning to head off in the wrong direction can be brought back around and continue to be assets to the force, he said.
Asked about police morale, Francis said by helping to fix problems, the system will help the department improve, which will help morale. By tracking data more effectively, the system helps identify the best officers too, he said, which will help the department give credit, such as when it decides on its officer of the month and so forth.
Asked what the program cost the police department, Walker started by saying his company had offered several discounts.
"At the end of the day, I believe it was about $30,000," he said.
"It was $33,000," Francis interjected at this point.
Asked about data showing the program helped departments improve their records, Walker said it has been used successfully by a number of other departments under similar consent decrees.
"One of our clients is the New Jersey State Police and my understanding is they just finally concluded their consent decree and IAPro was part of their efforts," Walker said. "I don’t have specific data on hand but anecdotally I hear every day how it is helping."
The data will be collected and put into the system by unit commanders and leaders, under the supervision of Internal Affairs officers, and by Internal Affairs officers themselves. Selected data will be viewable to authorized officers through a secure website and complete data will be available to Internal Affairs and appropriate top management.
The data to be collected includes all uses of force, all prisoner injuries, all cases where a subject is charged with "resisting arrest," "assault on a police officer," "disorderly conduct" or "obstruction of official business."
By standardizing the way the information is collected, the system will help make decisions about officer conduct more objective, less subject to favoritism or bias, and more readily comparable to the information gathered from other departments nationwide, Walker said.
Francis said the system will make it much easier to get a clear picture of what is happening across the three separate island-departments and across the whole system.
"Rather than going through boxes and boxes of papers and doing the calculations by hand, you press F10 and it prints a graph or pie chart for you," Francis said.
The federal consent decree, issued in response to complaints of excessive use of force by territorial police, specifically calls for such a system as this.
"The VIPD will develop and implement a risk management system to include a new computerized relational database or paper system for maintaining, integrating and retrieving information necessary for supervision and management of the VIPD," reads the decree in part. "Priority will be given to the VIPD obtaining any established program and system."
If fully implemented, the new system appears to meet those highly specific criteria and will provide a tool to meet the other demands of the decree, such as performing regular audits of officer conduct and implementing training and disciplinary protocols consistently.
