City has spent $50,000 in repairs and replacements
Gilroy – State-of-the-art computers installed over the last two years in 28 police cruisers have gone haywire, costing the city more than $50,000 in repairs and replacement parts, according to the Gilroy Police Department and purchase order records.
Officers have dealt with flickering screens, malfunctioning mouse touchpads, and complete shut-downs of the systems intended to transform each police cruiser into a roving dispatch center. With the exception of three cruisers in the fleet, each patrol car now has a laptop-like screen and keyboard in the front seat and a central processing unit mounted in the trunk.
Malfunctions in the CPUs have not sidelined any cars but have forced officers to once again rely on emergency dispatchers for details on vehicle registration, outstanding arrest warrants, and other information, according to Gilroy Police Capt. Jack Robinson.
“We weren’t able to keep the batteries charged in the cars and keep the computers running long enough,” Robinson said. “The system has a notification that when the battery level gets down to a certain point, it automatically shuts the computer down. An officer would go to a call, walk back to his car, and the computer would be off.”
To solve the power problem, the department began outfitting cruisers in August 2005 with heavy-duty batteries at a cost of $800 each. The department also tried to boost energy output by spending $5,782 on new alternators for 14 vehicles, though that solution was abandoned after engine belts frayed and cars lost power.
The department opted to continue installing more-robust batteries in 27 cruisers at a total cost of $21,600. The installations were completed in November 2005. Roughly six months later, the company hired to install the computers – SecureEye Systems Inc., of Lynnwood, Wash. – uncovered a software glitch in the operating systems on each computer.
Robinson said that glitch, responsible for causing many of the malfunctions, was fixed.
To date, the city has spent $50,828 on repairs and parts outside the scope of the original contract, and cost over-runs may not end any time soon. Six to 10 vehicles still have “consistent” hardware problems, Robinson said, pointing to excessive heat in the trunks of cruisers as a potential cause of malfunctioning CPUs.
Problems began cropping up in the new systems during test runs in five cruisers, Robinson said. Purchasing orders obtained from City Hall indicate that test installations took place in November 2003. It remains unclear if problems emerged before March 2004, when city council awarded a $684,559 bid to SecureEye. The five test cars started having problems before fleet-wide installation began in June 2005, Robinson said. By that time, the city had paid out half of the contract.
“It was at the point where we had paid for the product, needed to accept delivery and get it working,” Robinson said. “It was not where we could walk away from this and not use the product that we had purchased.”
To date, the city has paid $503,000 to SecureEye, according to purchase orders.
City Administrator Jay Baksa said the city will stop contract payments until all systems are fully functional. Officials plan to enter the “final acceptance phase” of the contract within two weeks, triggering a 90-day window in which vehicles must operate smoothly. The company, whose president Jim Masten was in meetings Thursday afternoon and did not return a call for comment, will have one chance to fix computer systems that continue to malfunction. Otherwise, officials plan to withhold the nearly $180,000 remaining on the contract.
“If they (fix) it, that’s fine,” Baksa said. “If not, we’re not paying for it.”
For the moment, the department will hold off on installing the last three of the 31 systems purchased from SecureEye. Robinson said the department would “phase out” the computer systems if the company fails to get them to work properly, rather than outfitting the entire fleet with new computers.
The systems have not been complete failures. More than half of the cruisers have functioning computers, and video cameras mounted on all cars have worked without any glitches. Problems only seem to arise when officers try to look up a car’s registration or file a report from the field.
“It’s technology and it’s not working as everyone would like it to,” Robinson said. “It’s causing aggravation.”
