High-tech law enforcement Bomb robot,
license scanners aid local police

by Katie Ryn Gargulinski, Tucson Citizen
09/21/07

The long arm of the law often reaches seven feet and is made of metal.
It's also attached to a robot that carries four cameras, costs $180,000 and weighs 400 pounds.

The Tucson police bomb squad robot, which protects officers from corrosive chemicals and explosives, is one of the high tech ways the department fights crime.
Some high-tech devices, such as the robot, are used in special circumstances. Others are used daily and a few are so new they have not hit the streets.
Within the next several months, car thieves should cringe when patrol cars are outfitted with high-speed imagers that officers can use to scan license plates in a parking lot in one fell swoop.

"The goal is to preload the computers in police cars with license plates from stolen cars," said James Wysocki, administrator of TPD's information services division.
Wysocki said the $24,000 device will save countless hours of officers' time. "They can drive by a couple of hundred cars and scan them all."

Other high-tech crime fighting occurs daily with computer systems that cost the department more than $3 million, Wysocki said. Some of the most time-saving and efficient systems are found in the vehicles. "The patrol cars look like spaceships," police Chief Richard Miranda told an introductory class of the Citizens' Police Academy.

Every police car contains a Mobile Tactical Computer (MTC) with access to COPLINK, a computer investigative system that can pull up data from TPD's main data base and other agencies to which it is connected. It gives cops a slew of mug shots, maps and a myriad of other information at the tap of a keyboard.
"COPLINK is sort of like the old sergeant in the office who never forgets anything," Wysocki said.

COPLINK prototypes were first developed by the University of Arizona's Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Tucson Police Department and put into play in 2001.
COPLINK, which is available nationwide, is used by law enforcement agencies from Hawaii to Massachusetts, its Web site said.

Even officers who have been on the force for decades, such as 36-year-veteran Officer Gary Lynch, are enthusiastic about the changes the new technology has brought about.

Lynch was one of the first officers to test COPLINK and the MTC; his first days on the force in the 1970s were without even a hand-held radio. "I never thought about having a hand-held radio," he said. "Now I feel naked without it."

He is becoming equally attached to the high-tech systems.

"You can run license plates right here (in the car), find warrants associated with the suspect," he said. "By the time you take your finger off (the keyboard or screen), the information comes back to you."

He can also write up reports between calls without leaving the driver's seat, instead of trekking back to the station.

"Police work is really the same," Lynch said. "It's the technology that has changed so much."

Another scanner, one that's been on Tucson streets for about two years with TPD's E-Citation program, is a hand-held unit that reads driver's licenses like credit cards, automatically filling out citations with information on the license.
While the $4,000 scanner does the job of six clerks, Wysocki said no employees have been eliminated because of advanced technology.

"No jobs have been lost," he said. "People are reassigned. There seems to be an elastic demand for law enforcement services. Our problem is one of growth, not of shrinking."

No matter how big Tucson gets, not many officers would volunteer to do the job of the bomb squad robot.

The robot, which has no nickname, has been with the department since February 2005 and goes on about 30 percent of the bomb squad calls, said supervisor Sgt. Ardan Devine.

The calls number between 150 and 230 per year and have ranged from removing a box of highly unstable nitroglycerin from an East Side home in June to ripping the duct tape off the face of a man who walked into a bank in October 2005 claiming he had taped a bomb in his mouth.

Devine said there is no threat the robot will eliminate any people positions.
"It can do things that protect us," he said. "It limits our time on target. But it is not a decision-maker."