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by Carolyn Potts

Friday, September 14, 2007

Thanks to a new initiative, police hope Madison residents can look forward to a more time-efficient and personal system of reporting crime in their neighborhoods.

Chief of Police Noble Wray recently created a committee of officers whose main goal is to decide how the police department can make the current system more user-friendly.

"The chief wants to update the system so that there is more human interaction with the residents reporting these crimes," said Joel DeSpain, public information officer for the Madison Police Department.

The current system requires a resident wishing to report a crime to provide an e-mail or phone request for a self-reporting system form, which is then mailed to the resident requesting police assistance. The resident must then send the form back to the police station, where there is no guarantee anything will be done with the case.

"The self reporting system is overused," Ald. Robbie Webber, District 5, said. "People report crimes with information, but because there are so many cases, they are not followed up on, and then the opportunity is lost. People just want something to be done."

Lt. Joe Balles said the committee plans to work on creating a web-based method for residents to report an entire incident, and then obtain a receipt. This way the information would be in the system in a much shorter time.

Balles, however, said the department needs to better educate the community, so they know when it is practical for the police to investigate.

"It doesn't make sense for every call to be dispatched to an officer," Balles said. "If it is a critical time of day, there is no reason for an officer to be sent if there is no lead and he is needed somewhere else."

According to DeSpain, the system for self-reporting crimes in Madison has a history of personal contact.

"When this program was first started, the police department used light-duty officers to take these reports, and people actually got to talk to an officer," DeSpain said.

However, the MPD no longer has enough officers to provide that kind of service. Annually there are 153,000 calls for service, 8,000 of which are sent through the self-reporting system. Many of those cases are reported for insurance purposes.

However, Balles said there is an occasional case that is wrongly sent to the self-reporting system when it should be dispatched to an officer.

"When you have 65 different dispatchers, there is going to be some variation as to when to send an officer and when not to," Balles said.

To help solve this problem, there will be dispatchers involved in the police committee work so that they can try to prevent cases that require immediate attention from going to self-reporting system.

The committee will begin meeting this fall, and the new system should be in place late this year or early 2008.

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