<bt>Right now, getting in touch with a police officer at the Reston District Station can be a difficult task. The station has one main telephone line and if a call comes in for an individual officer, a communications officer will take down a message with a pad and pen.
"This is more frustrating for the citizens," said station captain Ed Roessler. "I’ll be at the front desk, or I’ll hear on the intercom there is a call for such and such. But it gets so busy during the day shift that the communications person will be processing five calls at a time."
To help correct this problem, Roessler is instituting a station-wide e-mail system. By the end of February, the 100-plus officers at the Reston District Police Station will all have their own e-mail addresses.
Roessler said the e-mail addresses will let officers respond to citizen inquiries when it is most convenient. Officers at the station work 11-and-a-half hour shifts, sometimes overnight when most people are sleeping.
"If there was a guy working overnights from 7:30 p.m. to 7:30 a.m., it might be hard to get a hold of him," Roessler said. "But if he has e-mail, it’s a little bit easier. You can just zap him an e-mail."
Each officer at the Reston station is assigned to a specific area that he or she patrols each time he or she is on duty. E-mail addresses will be printed on officers’ business cards, so whenever an officer hands out a card, citizens can say, "That’s my officer," said Roessler.
E-mail also gives officers the ability to easily forward messages to the correct county agencies. For example, if a neighbor hasn’t trimmed his or her grass in a while, an officer can alert the proper county authorities.
"The officer doesn’t have to set up a meeting and physically drive to the person’s neighborhood anymore," Roessler said. "Most problems can be resolved on-line."
<mh>High Quality
<bt>Other stations have e-mail systems, but Roessler said the Reston station is the local leader in quality of equipment. The station has nine general-use computers and one computer for each supervisor. In addition, school resource officers, who work on-site at local schools, have their own laptops. Much of the equipment was donated by Concert, a telecommunications venture based in Reston Town Center. At Herndon High School, officer Lonnie Doucette was recently able to put his laptop to good use.
"At Herndon they were conducting an exercise for emergency management training," Roessler said. "Out of the briefcase came the laptop and [Doucette] had all the plans right there. He was quickly able to retrieve the information without someone having to go down the hall and get the manual and the floor plans."
Officers will also have time management systems on the computers, such as personal calendars where they can plug in their frequent court dates.
"Let's say an officer is on leave, and we get a call asking what days he is going to be around," said officer Joe Gould, who worked out most of the technical aspects of the project. "In theory, we could just go into the calendar and say, ‘He’s going to be in on such and such a day.’"
So far, Roessler said, the computers have been a hit with the Reston officers.
"It’s amazing to see the transformation," the captain said. "If you sit in [the computer] room at the end of the day, during the shift overlap, you see a lot of guys using the computers. They love it. There are some with the typical fear of computers, those who have never used one. But they really learn quickly."
Ronal Goff, a master police officer who has worked at the station for 26 years, said he is happy to see the new e-mail system come into place.
"It’s nice to be able to be in touch with people," Goff said.