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| Sheriff’s View #30 for July 19 to 23, 2010 |
By: Sheriff J.B. King
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Posted: Wednesday, July 21, 2010 9:48 am
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Sheriff J.B. King
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Welcome aboard one more time. Hopefully today we will have a decent column full of good information for you to read. I am not sure where to start today so I think I will jump straight to the calls for service/case number count. As of 2:47 p.m. on July 18, the count stands at 5,977 for this year. It appears that we will once again be right at the 10,000 mark for 2010.
On the car front, the hot weather has helped nail a number of our vehicles but we have been able to bounce them right back into service. We have two right now that Maj. Tom Cristoffer is working on completing and we hope to pick up another vehicle in the very near future that we recently purchased. For now, the car front is looking very good.
The recent blitz of media articles about our work efforts has produced a humorous side note. A friend told me that someone had commented to her that I must be up for election this year considering all the news releases that I had sent out to the media. The answer is no, I am not up for election; I am just trying to do a better job of telling the world just how busy we are and what kinds of job stress we face due to our limited manpower base. The next election for sheriff will be in 2012.
However, we do stay busy. As I recall last year, we arrested 613 people on felony violations and another 813 for significant misdemeanor offenses. When you add those numbers together and start working on the news releases behind those numbers, that equals a lot of news releases. It is my belief that if the citizens of Pulaski County fully understand how busy and how swamped we are, if they ever get a chance to vote on the law enforcement sales tax, the tax issue will pass on the first ballot attempt.
Yes, we do understand that the current budget is limited and we are doing our best to live within that budget and still try to produce a good enforcement job, but the low budget does hamper our efforts. Our efforts are devoted to your safety so this is an issue that concerns everybody.
During the past few months, a lot of long-range planning for the future has occurred on both our local scene and on the state scene. Sometime in the near future, I will try to touch on a few of these issues in a column. For today, I need to report that as a result of studying our current records management system, better known as the Crimestar reporting system, in relation to some of these long term developments, I have uncovered some very interesting numbers.
The Crimestar system was purchased in 2004 and came on-line full time in 2005. Roughly two years ago, we added a computer aided dispatch module to the system. As with all the good records management systems, Crimestar allows us to extract information from the database that has been established over time by the use of the system. While looking at the system this past week, I discovered a module unit within Crimestar that I did not know existed. It was a report on the database statistics. As a result of looking at that report, I am about to give you a whole bunch of big numbers on what has gone into the system over the past six years. In many ways, these numbers are not accurate because we have not used every module in the system or we have only used the module for a limited time period, so please do not take these numbers and divide by six years because that would not be accurate. Just take the numbers as what is in the system now.
The first example will be the arrest and booking into the jail numbers which stood at 10,183 as of July 16 of this year. There were 1,560 traffic citations entered into the citation module. I know for a fact that not all deputies were doing that a few years ago so this number is lower than the actual number. We had 8,019 incidents that we did reports on and another 12,509 property reports. It also listed a total of 96 registrants or sex offenders in the system.
The statistics report listed a total of 25,629 calls for service. It listed a master name index that contains 20,897 names. The report listed 17,456 vehicles in the database and it listed 20,353 addresses in the index. These numbers were created each time a deputy listed a name in a report, or wrote the traffic ticket, or arrested the subject. Each time we go to an address a listing for that address is created. The same holds true on the creation of the vehicle information database every time a vehicle is mentioned in a report.
So what can we do with this database? If we run a possible suspect named John Doe against the system, we get his last known address and other information. If we get a 911 call from a specific address we can run the address and discover any history of calls at this address and uncover any possible threats to deputies. We can use the database to our advantage and it helps us work faster and more efficiently.
My primary reason for sharing this information today is to simply and once again tell you how hard the deputies are working and how busy we stay. You do not put 20,897 names into a database by sitting on your you know what. The same comment applies to the 20,353 addresses in the system. You can only achieve numbers like this in only a few years by a lot of hard work around the clock. That is my point for this database system. It is just one more measure of our work efforts as a sheriff’s department.
Once again I find myself over the word limit, so please drive with care and please keep your actions legal. We are going to be way over budget this year on the inmate board bill and we definitely do not need your jail business this year, but the light bulb is bright!
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