IN BRIEF: Oklahoma City Police honored for technology

While there has been great leaps in technology, there have been a few steps behind. One is interoperability. First of all, the system was ramrodded into existence due to the deaths of officer Rominger and trooper Matt Evans. The premise was that had Rominger been able to convey that he was headed toward Matt with a high speed chase, Matt would have been able to avoid the collision. At the time, some trooper cars had up to 6 radios for the interoperability. The new system was supposed to reduce that count to 1 radio per car. There lies the problem. Oklahoma City uses the most sophisticated communications system in the world. It is even used by our military in worldwide theaters of engagement. The troopers use a much less sophisticated system in order to include rapid communication between Moore, Edmond, Norman, Village, Nichols Hills, Midwest City, Shawnee, Ok County, and dozens of other hamlets. One system is a cocoon of coverage for departments from 5 officers to hundreds. Oklahoma City PD is NOT a part of that system. So, you have what they call a communications nexus between Oklahoma City police and 40 other agencies. The crux of this nexus working effectively is linking of radio systems and then decoding the highly multiply-encrypted data from OKC and passing it along to the state 800 system. Easy you say. No. Two dozen things can and often do go wrong in the link. Think of this analogy to help you imagine the problem. A person speaking chinese wishes to order a pizza while using a cellphone from Verizon. The pizza restaurant uses Cox Digital for their phone service. The Chinese person makes the call and its passed from one a tower to a computer to a dozen translators and then to Pizza Hut. The person at Pizza Hut answers and the Chinese person does not know English. SO a person working at Pizza Hut does speak Chinese but not the same dialect. So the pizza hut person tries to translate the information to English so the computer at Pizza Hut can place the order. How has this hurt things? If Officer Rominger were headed down I-40 today and Matt Evans were headed the same way, officer Rominger pushes an alert button on his radio and hopefully he can put out a broadcast about the chase. Does OCPD do that now? No, they do not because it causes more harm than good.