JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. (WJHL) — Johnson City commissioners approved a $142,537 expense Thursday that will bring the Johnson City Police Department’s (JCPD) record-keeping software to a level recommended in a recent internal audit that characterized that system as inadequate.
The upgrade will bring all JCPD records into one seamless system. The Daigle Law Group, which the city commissioned last year to prepare a report on its handling of sexual assault cases, labeled the JCPD’s records management system “inadequate to support the effective operation of the department.”
Eric Daigle’s team needed longer to complete the report than it otherwise would have in part due to the “outdated and archaic records management system.”
JCPD Major Scotty Carrier said the new Watson software modules, provided by vendor Data Driven LLC, will rectify that.
“If we want to go and we want to archive something or pull something out of the system, we now have that one system that we can get into versus before we had a Watson system along with an RMS system that we had to try to mesh the two,” Carrier told commissioners.
“This is going to integrate that all together so it will be much more expedient for us to pull information out now.”
Carrier said the vendor expects to have the system delivered and fully operational within four months.
The records issue topped Daigle’s list of eight recommended changes that JCPD execute to improve its handling of sexual assault cases.
