Friday, November 21, 2003
The New Zealand Hearld
DURHAM - A police officer sees a bank robbery suspect speed by and says "pursuit".
Automatically, his car's blue lights, siren, flashing headlights and video camera turn on.
The car also sends a message to dipatch giving the location and saying the officer is chasing someone.
This voice-recognition system is not a prototype--it's on patrol in New Hampshire today.
It means officers can keep their hands on the wheel and eyes on the road instead of fiddling with switches, buttons, dials and microphones as they weave through traffic.
It's called Project 54, after a 1960s police television comedy, Car 54, Where Are You?
University of New Hampshire engineers started developing the system in 1999 after they saw the number of tasks police officers performed behind the wheel.
"To pull you over for doing one thing, they have to do 12 different things," engineer Brett Vinciguerra said.
"They have to turn the lights on, turn the siren on, figure out where they are, pick up the radio, turn on the video camera, radio in that they are are pulling someone over."
After two years of testing, state police have about 75 smart cars, and more are being added weekly.
A system with similar goals, called Tacnet, is being developed by Visteon of Dearborn, Michigan.
Its prototype is being tested by North Carolina state police and in Maryland, Michigan and California.
It should be on routine patrol by about March, said sales manager Jeff Pauley, at a cost of about US$10,000 $15,670) a car.
Users of Project54 say it has transformed radio communications for them.
Instead of tapping a button to change channels, an officer now presses a button on the steering wheel and tunes the radio to any community or troop station by calling out its name.
The system uses a variety of standard voice-recognition programs, although officers can still operate equipment by hand.
"Finding your channel out of 256 while you are trying to manoeuvre around traffic and through traffic can be a little stressful," says New Hampshire state police sergeant Mark Liebl, who has driven a smart cruiser for two years as Project 54's main guinea pig.
University of New Hampshire professor William Lenharth, the lead engineer, remembers the first time he sat in Liebel's police car.
The front seat was jammed with equipment, and Liebl constantly reached away from the wheel.
Vincent Stile, president of the Association of Police Communication Officials, has seen Project 54 and says it should be more widely used than it is.
"It's not a novelty," said Stile, head of radio operations for the Suffolk County Police Department on Long Island, New York.
The system was born out of a New Hampshire tragedy in 1997, when a gunman killed two troopers, a parttime judge and a newspaper editor in the remote town of Colebrook.
As local, state, county and federal officers from Vermont and New Hampshire tracked the killer, many couldn't talk to each other by radio.
In response, agencies converted to digital systems to transmit voice and data.
Adding computers was a logical next step, but with so much equipment already in cars, they had to consolidate.
The programme was helped by US$15 million ($23.5million) in federal grants.
An increasing number of American police agencies have access to FBI and other databases through wireless digital communications.
Project 54 enhances that feature by allowing officers to interact by voice rather than typing querires into a computer.
The heart of the system is a small computer in a console between the front seats, with several cigarettepack-sized control boxes in the boot that let the computer communicate with the car's equipment.