Monday, September 19, 2016

Allow myself to introduce... myself

Paul Ricci's Blog - Introduction



Welcome to my blog!

I'm excited to share some police technology history and hopefully we can learn about new technologies that can be used in policing. A little bit about myself...

I am a retired Captain from the North Providence, RI police department. Hired in 1992, I was interested in becoming a police officer because my father was also a police officer. As a child, I saw how exciting the job can be, and could see how an officer could help people in the community. During my career, I was able to be involved in the many technological advances that have taken place in the profession. After nearly 21 years in law enforcement, I was able to see the progression from all paper based systems to the modern, nearly paperless systems in use today.

In 1992, there were no "computers" as we now know them in use in the police department. However, there were "dummy" terminals connected to a mainframe system. This was called the Wang System, and I have a couple of images for your viewing pleasure:



These beautiful systems were essentially digital filing systems that replaced the old file cards that were used to track the police reports, suspects, stolen articles, or other police information. Actually, they did not replace the file cards because we still kept the old file cards in use for when these dummy terminals failed. As I recall, the Wang system was down quite a bit, I realized why it was called a dummy terminal!

In this blog, I plan on discussing how we progressed from these unreliable systems to the systems in use today. In addition, I'll discuss emerging technologies that police will use to make their jobs easier to help keep us safe. Finally, I'll include some interesting tidbits as to how I went from having essentially no computer knowledge to managing the entire police network. 

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