Selling technology to cops, part 3: Get dad involved, keep it simple

Nick Selby and Dave Henderson on the power of simplicity when it's time to sell cops new technology.

By Nick Selby and Dave Henderson

April 26, 2011 — CSO —

In our agency (in the Dallas-Fort Worth area), all rookies have to do a stint in dispatch. Henderson served as a dispatcher for years and knew exactly what I was in for.

He saw my reaction when I filled in my first DWI report. I made a late-life conversion into the cop thing -- I spent the last several years writing reports on security technology at an industry analyst firm, and before that I was consulting, and before that writing about technology.

I've seen bleeding edge stuff for years. I taught myself to be a Linux system administrator, and feel pretty comfortable around technology.

So you can imagine how I felt when it took me four and a half hours to fill in a DWI report using a piece of software so horrible, so un-intuitive -- nay, so counter-intuitive -- that it would have made a Soviet apparatchik proud, as just having it in the office creates busy work for at least two people.

Over the last couple of weeks, we've written (in Part I of this series) that there are three qualities law enforcement agencies want when they buy technology: it must be integrated, it must be simple and it must have utility. Last time (in Part II) we talked about integration.

Now we've arrived at "simplicity."

Henderson has watched me as I fill in arrest reports. Ten days ago I arrested someone on a totally routine thing -- she had several outstanding warrants from another agency. I filled out my narrative, went through the seven screens required, hit save and hit the streets. Three hours later I came back to tidy up and get it filed.

It was gone.

A colleague said, "Oh yeah. That happens all the time."

And I'm turning a mottled beet red.

So now comes my time in dispatch. Here's the setup: I'm sitting at a Windows box and there's a radio in front of me. A patrol car calls in a license plate, asking for a "28", basically running the tag for information and whether there's any warrants attached to its owner. I type in the license-plate number. I hit F5.

Why do I hit F5? How do you even make a Windows program in which [Enter] is [F5]? Why would you?

Five windows pop up. Five.

In the first one, there's a long warning. You need to scroll down. It tells you that the information you are requesting is sensitive and for law enforcement only. Whew! Good thing I'm wearing a police uniform, sitting in a police dispatch office. You keep scrolling down and finally it tells you:

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