Posted on Mon, Mar. 10, 2008

BILOXI -- Frustrated by a lack of progress with a $19 million federal computer project, Biloxi city officials recently spent $800,000 in drug forfeiture money on a separate computer system for their police and fire departments.

Police Chief Bruce Dunagan said he's tired of waiting on the Mississippi Automated System Project to deliver technology to his officers, and the city is terminating its five-year relationship with the program this month.

"We can't wait around," Dunagan said. "We've still got all the citizens out here to help."

Launched in 2002, the pilot project at the University of Southern Mississippi administered by Project Director Julian Allen promised to create an information-sharing network for Coast public safety - police, fire, jails, all linked into one system. Its goal was to end any communication-system turf wars between agencies in Harrison, Hancock and Jackson counties, and help solve crimes faster.

Sen. Thad Cochran and former Sen. Trent Lott backed the project - the brainchild of former Harrison County Sheriff George H. Payne Jr. - with pledges of $25 million through 2009, hoping the network would expand across the state and eventually the nation. The equipment came at no cost to the users, with no contract to sign. It was, essentially, free technology.

Almost every public safety agency in South Mississippi - from Ocean Springs in the east to Waveland in the west - signed on.

Biloxi leaders, like others, believed their patrol officers would soon be accessing mug shots, criminal histories and arrest warrants, with the data crawling across laptop screens once the "enter" key is tapped. The technology was promised to be delivered by February 2005.

Tired of waiting, Biloxi nearly emptied its drug forfeiture "rainy day" fund to purchase a package from Tyler Technology, a renowned leader in public sector software. It's a system also used by Gulfport, which chose not to join the MASP at the outset.

"We would be going backward," Gulfport Fire Chief Pat Sullivan said, adding that MASP didn't offer them anything they weren't already using.

In addition, Allen, the MASP director, could never answer what it would actually cost to run his system once the federal tax dollars were exhausted in 2009.

Police Chief Alan Weatherford doesn't want the decision back. On March 1, the city launched a $2 million wireless program - also funded by drug forfeiture money - for about 175 officers and city officials.

The Tyler-designed software has officers accessing criminal records and viewing mug shots from their cruisers, the information routed from the city's server and zapped into their mounted laptops.

"The technology is there," Weatherford said. "It's been there."

'Behind the curve'

Public safety agencies in Chicago, Topeka, and New York City have used such data-sharing networks for years. With the technology already available, many city and county leaders questioned why Allen wanted to "reinvent the wheel."

Backed by millions of federal tax dollars, Allen insisted he had the opportunity to build a national model, worthy of Homeland Security's praise. He provided a lengthy list of experts who would help develop the software, including consultants from Stennis Space Center paid up to $450 per day, and a judge paid $30,000 for 75 days of work to provide criminal justice insight.

And during his presentation, Allen also talked about 400 surveys of Coast emergency officials and other potential end-users who wanted a new system.

"They bring in all these academicians, and they could have already bought something off the shelf," said Harley Schinker, former Long Beach police chief and Chicago police electronics director. "Why waste the time and the money? Why?"

"We're (now) seven to 10 years behind the curve," he said.

Before leaving the Windy City force in 2002 for the Coast, Schinker's patrol officers had been swapping data with other agencies around Chicago for about eight years. Allen's concept, Schinker said, was insulting.

"I never bought into it from the day I walked in the door and heard the spiel," said Schinker, who retired from Long Beach in 2006. "I wanted to know what cave I was in. I wanted to know if they bought this bogus (expletive) from Fred Flintstone."

But Schinker's 70-member squad, along with other smaller agencies across the Coast, didn't have the resources or the budgets to turn away. The system provided a chance, a hope to replace pens and paper with modern technology.

"It sounded like it would give an agency the opportunity to participate in something that, individually, they would never (financially) do," said Ronald Cuevas, Hancock County undersheriff.

"If it wasn't for the (Mississippi) Automated System Project," said Pass Christian dispatcher Gloria Saunders, "we wouldn't have a CAD." The software, which costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, is vital to sending first responders to emergency calls.

The departments will ride out the wave, hoping the new MASP system modeled after a Florida sheriff's office will work. It is the only option.

On the 'slow boat'

Allen defends his decisions, saying he couldn't simply purchase a package from a "software store" and "plug it in."

"This is an extremely complicated, complex project," he said. "The decisions on this project were never made in a vacuum."

"The intent of the project was not only providing that mobile data capabilities," he said, "but it was these agencies being able to share information - a world, a gold mine of intelligence in the jail system."

The basis by which the MASP was founded - an "open source paradigm" linking multiple jurisdictions under one jail system, entering case files and sharing information - was unparalleled by any other agency in the country, said Cecil Burge, a vice president at USM.

Former Harrison County Sheriff Payne, who helped conceive the program, did not return messages seeking comment.

In the MASP grant proposal, Payne said he was tired of his deputies calling neighboring jurisdictions for record checks on criminal John Doe.

"That's about as real-time as a slow boat to China," he said.

His correspondence with the Justice Department and state legislatures ultimately helped secure millions of tax dollars for the computer system, a system blamed in part for overcrowding at the Harrison County jail.

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