 The computer revolution. It's going to recreate the workplace. No more paper. Elimination of repetitive assembly line jobs. Goodbye, drudgery. Computers will make everyone's life easier. Most of the work of most of the people will be done by machines. It's the night. Many of the promises of the computer revolution have yet to be realized. Law enforcement is one area that hasn't fully wreaked the benefits the computer revolution promised. Until now. The U.S. Department of Transportation and the Texas Transportation Institute, with support from the Texas Department of Transportation, are building a better information system for data management and law enforcement. Advanced Law Enforcement Response Technology, or ALERT, is an exciting application of first response technology. ALERT allows officers to collect traffic and incident data more efficiently while ensuring a greater margin of on-the-job safety. It's public safety technology for the 21st century, supported by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. It's on Brother and Mama. Crash has changed normally safe streets into hazardous environments for police, rescue personnel and crash victims. Along with the danger comes traffic congestion for other drivers. Traffic stacks up while the crash scene remains unclear. Police officers can spend hours out of every day clearing these scenes. The challenges are many. Long waits for information. Numerous forms to complete and occasionally inaccurate traffic data to sort through. Clearly, this important task is far more complicated than it should be. ALERT operates on a rugged onboard computer located in the patrol car's trunk. A touchscreen display is the only visual hint that this is a machine with a mission. The computer and screen integrate all police car functions including lights, siren, radar, radio, video and global positioning system. The display, handheld remote unit and digital camera give officers wireless communication power with an easy reach. Ticket and accident forms are stored in the handheld unit. Photos are electronically captured, printed and transmitted. No fumbling with an endless stream of paper form. The officer enters information electronically into the computer on site. Data is entered only once ensuring its integrity. In addition, ALERT allows officers to directly access federal, state and local traffic and criminal records without depending on a dispatcher to relay that information. Electronic data entry means police officers can process more information more quickly compared to the conventional paper form. Time savings adds up real fast. For example, College Station Texas officers worked approximately 1,900 crashes in 1995. Our average time required to clear those crashes was approximately 50 minutes. Depending on the complexity of the crash, time savings by our officers on the scene are estimated at between 20 and 50 percent. With quicker and more accurate data collection, our officers are expected to be back on the street a lot sooner. Because ALERT allows officers to enter data electronically at the scene, errors made while transcribing handwriting or repeatedly re-entering the data are eliminated. Information is more complete because the reports are partially automated and much easier to fill out. A software editing feature helps pinpoint errors as data is entered. After information is entered only one time, it is sent electronically to state records databases or the officer's base station. Because data is entered more quickly, records are complete and up to date. Collecting the data in a manner that allows uploading to databases closest to the scene of that incident will reduce the overhead involved in collecting the information and getting it into a system. It will improve the accuracy of that data and improve the timings. Those are kind of hidden benefits to using the ALERT vehicle. It's kind of a win-win situation. With complete and accurate information, highway engineers can make better decisions when developing operations improvements. The ALERT vehicle is going to answer some of the more serious questions and solve some of the more serious problems we have. From our perspective, from the Highway Safety Office's perspective, we use information to identify problems as the way we allocate money. It's how we decide that we are going to do different projects. So accident data is critical to us. Citation information is critical to us as well. From just a general traffic records point of view, there are a multitude of users out there. The EMS people want to know where accidents are happening so they can station their ambulances nearby. They want to know where traffic congestion is the worst so that they can avoid that area if they have to if they're responding to emergency call. Traffic engineers have to know traffic volumes on sections of road everywhere before they do an overlay project so they know what materials to use and how to build it. All that information is essential to making decisions on how we're going to spend money in the future. I'm Clay Taylor with the Department of Public Safety. I've been in law enforcement for over 15 years. With all the advancements in technology, police work is still dangerous and paperwork is a real pain. Alert technology will make my job safer and more efficient. Alert provides an element of safety to the officer and at the same time an element of convenience. It has taken advantage of all of the modern technology. It's done the things that we believe needed to be done years ago. It's made the environment of that automobile safer for the officer by moving things around, by eliminating the need to flip switches and do all of the things that we do manually. It streamlines the reporting time frame, if you will. More instantaneous reports back to individuals and we've got to remember that writing a citation and making an arrest, although valuable, really is not the end of the product. Reporting that information and having it accurately tabulated and accounted for is very valuable. For the officer in the field, alert enhances convenience and safety. Features like the lights, siren, radar, video camera and global positioning equipment are operated independently or in a pre-programmed sequence from a single touch sensitive screen. The sequence can be prescribed by departmental policy. When things get hectic, response is automatic. This clean cockpit approach allows officers one touch operation of vital controls. No fumbling for switches, no flying objects if the airbags deploy. I'm Sergeant Greg Lewis with the College Station Texas Police Department. When I'm on a contact, I no longer have to return to my car nor rely on dispatch for the information I need. I have all the communication power, when and where I need it. A magstripe reader and barcode reader directly enters driver's license information and vehicle identification numbers. This allows me to quickly obtain information to check for wants or stolen. This information can also be entered into the ticket or accident forms program. I can download the data from my unit or save it to a data file at the end of my shift. The global positioning system allows dispatch to quickly locate me in the event I need assistance and I can't communicate with them. It pinpoints a crash location or where I issue a citation. All of this right in the palm of my hand. The U.S. Department of Transportation invited law enforcement officers and traffic records managers from across the United States to form the Alert Technical Working Group. Since law enforcement, there's probably been three significant steps. One of them is in the introduction of the radio. Another one is the weapon. This is the police vehicle and now this is the fourth one. This is going to provide the officer with everything that he needs on the street. Alert is certainly going to bring to the law enforcement community. I think beyond what we recognize right now, it's going to keep going further and further. When you hear leading law enforcement officials across the country at the federal level as well as the state and local level saying that this is good and this is the best thing that's happened to law enforcement and long-time technology-wise, then Alert is certainly going to bring about some changes that we may not even know the full results of for a long time, but certainly good changes. This is the most exciting thing in my career in law enforcement and it's going to have a tremendous impact today, tomorrow, and in the future. Alert. Public safety technology for the 21st century. New features are constantly being integrated. Off-the-shelf technology, not fancy one-of-a-kind systems. Alert is a modular plug-and-play concept. All alert components integrate seamlessly into the open system architecture. Industry working group participation helped make this possible. Traffic safety is just the leading edge of alert technology application. The system can be adapted to support all phases of criminal investigation and law enforcement, EMS, fire, emergency incident management, street maintenance, commercial vehicle operations, even communicating with trains to make rail crossing safer. In the future, government agencies must work smarter. Technology has to work harder. Communication and information sharing make alert the public safety technology for the 21st century.