It's not to spy on them or anything."
Lt. John Harmon demonstrates the Tennessee Highway Patrol’s GPS that is used to keep up with the location of all of their officers.GPS technology seems to be everywhere — in cars, in phones, in watches. Chattanooga fire trucks have it. Hamilton County EMS ambulances have it. But Chattanooga Police Department patrol cars don’t.
There is no master map that shows dispatchers where officers are, or which officer is closest to a call. There’s no real-time location data to reference at all. Instead, officers self-report their activities to dispatchers. I’m doing this, I’m doing that. I’m going here, I’m going there. And dispatchers send officers to calls the old-fashioned way: by radio, based on the officer’s last-known location.
“The dispatcher only knows that [the officer] is either on a call or off a call,” police Chief Fred Fletcher said. “She doesn’t know where he is or what he is doing. And the officer doesn’t know what calls are available. Plus, he doesn’t know where his partners are.”
It’s inefficient and time-consuming. But the technology to track cars with GPS has been available for decades, and Fletcher now hopes to equip the department’s 380 cars with automated vehicle-locating technology. The department is asking the city of Chattanooga for about $311,000 from the 2015-2016 budget to purchase and install a fleet-wide GPS system.