Countywide : Grant to Pay for Police Computer Network

Thanks to a federal grant of more than $500,000, police departments across Orange County will be able to form a regional computer system that will greatly speed up booking and reporting procedures so that officers can spend less time at the station and more on the streets.

Lt. Dan Johnson of the Huntington Beach Police Department said that the grant, announced Tuesday by Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), will benefit police departments in his city as well as Santa Ana, Costa Mesa, Fountain Valley, Irvine, Newport Beach, Seal Beach, Westminster and the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

The money was awarded through the U.S. Department of Justice under the “Cops on the Beat” section of the 1994 national crime bill.

Santa Ana Police Department, which received $228,910, will use part of its money to buy laptop computers and software to streamline investigators’ work, Lt. Rick Hicks said.

Johnson said Huntington Beach will also buy computer hardware and software.

“It will cut down on the amount of time officers spend in the station writing reports, and it will get them back out on the streets.”

Johnson said that Huntington Beach police make about 7,800 arrests a year. For each of those, he said, an officer can spend as long as four hours on paperwork, he said.

“The whole idea is to cut the amount of time it takes an officer to process a person who has been arrested,” he said. “If we can cut that by 75%, which we think we can, it’s a lot of time saved.”

For the nine Orange County agencies involved in the program, Johnson said, officials project a total time savings of 38,046 hours a year--the equivalent of 18 officers working full time.