The Hamilton County Sheriff's Office and Chattanooga Police Department appear to have their wires crossed regarding in-car computer communications for patrol officers countywide.
Don Gorman, director of administration for the sheriff's office, attended the Hamilton County Commission's agenda session Wednesday to discuss hiring a full-time network specialist at an annual cost of $83,376 for salary and benefits.
Gorman told commissioners the HCSO had set up a new system for in-car access to police records because Chattanooga was going to stop operating the countywide system it had run for 17 years. That would mean patrol deputies and local police officers wouldn't be able to call up arrest reports, citations and other information on their in-car laptops.
"They decided a year ago they were going to a different software package, different hardware setup, and gave us warning about it, which is why we stood our own up," Gorman said. "The rest of the municipalities didn't necessarily jump on board with it right away, and this is what's happening now, we're just trying to cover them."
Officers can still talk to each other countywide by radio or on cellphones, but computer records would only be available through the Coplink data-sharing system or the Fusion Center in Nashville rather than the Tritech system Chattanooga set up with a grant in 2001, Gorman said.
The sheriff's office has signed a three-year contract with Soddy-Daisy, East Ridge, Lookout Mountain and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga for the service, and those agencies will pay half the cost for the IT specialist, he said.
Commissioner Tim Boyd strongly denounced the notion that Chattanooga would arbitrarily pull out of a countywide public safety network.
"This, to me, is unacceptable for the safety and health of our citizens," Boyd said.
He said the commission has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to "get all this first-responder communications squared away, computers, radios, I don't care what," and asked for a written explanation of "how this happened, why it happened, and why is Chief [David] Roddy backing out of it."
"I implore Chief Roddy and Sheriff [Jiim] Hammond to get their heads together very, very quick," Boyd said.
Commissioner Joe Graham said he was concerned there would be a "breakdown in communication that's been there for a very long time" and thanked the sheriff's office for stepping up.
But the Chattanooga Police Department's IT head, Lt. John Chambers, said it's the sheriff' office, not the city, that switched systems, and that Gorman may have misunderstood the issue.
He said Gorman mixed up the Tritech records management system, which is what officers can use to call up arrest reports and other information, and the city's report-writing software that allows officers to file paperwork from their cars.
The sheriff's office, Chambers said, switched from the city's server-based Tritech system to a cloud-based version of the same program.
"We have the same system and the city has been supporting the server since 2001 and it has not changed," Chambers said Wednesday. The police department will continue to host and support the Tritech system at no cost to municipalities that choose to stay, he said.
Chambers said he and Roddy, along with the East Ridge and Soddy-Daisy departments, met at the sheriff's office a few months ago to talk about the shift.
"I know the impact this would have had on the other agencies, and it didn't make sense to us," he said.
The characterization at the commission meeting that the city had broken with the other agencies "painted a picture of Chattanooga as if we weren't a team player, as if we split off and did our own thing, and that could not be further from the truth," Chambers said.
Chattanooga Police Department spokeswoman Elisa Myzal added: "Chief Roddy said at no point has the sheriff or Tim Boyd or anyone from the county commission expressed any concern to him about this. If they had an issue they certainly didn't say anything to him."
Contact staff writer Judy Walton at jwalton@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6416.