Rather than filing paper reports with Internal Affairs, V.I. police officers will soon upload "use of force" reports from 27 different police command centers—sometimes even from the scene, police officials said Thursday at a press conference.
The new software, called BlueTeam, is an extension of an off-the-shelf computerized risk-management system to track use-of-force information called IAPro, which the V.I. Police Department implemented in 2009.
Both are steps toward fulfilling a major requirement of a federal consent decree the VIPD signed onto that year mandating the department improve training on use of force and take an array of measures to track uses of force and react to excessive force complaints.
"In a nutshell, BlueTeam is nothing more than a web-based program that allows officers in the field to enter Internal Affairs," said Todd Fasulo, a training specialist with IAPro, during a break in teaching VIPD trainers how to use the new system.
The way the software is set up, every time the incident report is accessed, there is a log of the time and of who accessed it, Fasulo said. Only the officer who initiates the report can edit the details of the incident and all changes are tracked and dated.
As the report moves through the police chain of command, supervisors would have to sign off that the use of force conformed to policy, and their comments would be recorded as well.
The IAPro system, set-up in 2009, moved the VIPD’s personnel and use-of-force tracking from pieces of paper in multitudinous files to an actual digital database, where reports and graphs can be produced with the touch of a button. But reports still needed to be manually written up and submitted to Internal Affairs, for loading onto the system. The BlueTeam software further automates and streamlines the process by having individual officers submit reports directly into the system.
Citizen complaints of excessive force would also be entered into the system, Fasulo said.
The VIPD had to upgrade its network to accommodate the new system, said VIPD Management Information Systems Director Kareem Christian at the press conference.
Right now, the system is up and running, and IAPro is training the officers who will then train the rest of the department to use it, Christian said. Because bandwidth and reliability are issues with internet communications in the territory, for the time being there are two linked, but independent servers; one in each district, Christian said.
When trying to stream data beyond local networks, any hiccups in the bandwidth caused the software to lock up, so it was more practical to store St. Croix data on St. Croix and so forth, he said. But if and when the territory’s networks improved, the department would merge the two into a single relational database, he said.
The database and the BlueTeam interface for officers are both part of efforts to meet the consent decree’s mandate for the VIPD to develop and implement a risk-management system with a computerized relational database for maintaining, integrating, and retrieving information.
The VIPD is supposed to regularly use this data to promote civil rights and best police practices; to
manage risk and liability; and to help objectively evaluate officers’ performance.
One of the final pieces of the consent decree puzzle, the VIPD has a Sept. 15 deadline to implement such a system, according to the most recent schedule filed in U.S. District Court.
The consent decree and forms for registering complaints, or alternatively compliments concerning police behavior can be viewed and downloaded from the VIPD website. http://www.vipd.gov.vi
