KEN YUSZKUS/Staff photo
William H. Lenharth looks inside a police vehicle equipped with a voice-activated computer system slated to go into Salem, N.H., police cruisers. Lenharth is director of research computing at the University of New Hampshire.

Voice-activated tools come to police cars

By James A. Kimble
Staff Writer

SALEM, N.H. -- When police Lt. William Ganley calls in a license plate from his police cruiser, he might find himself "waiting in line" behind several other calls to dispatch to find out if the driver he just pulled over has any outstanding arrest warrants or is considered dangerous.

Even using a laptop computer inside the cruiser during busy times can mean getting a record back too late.

"You may be waiting while the car passes you and slips off to a side street," Ganley explained.

Consider the difference in a police cruiser retrofitted with the voice-activated "Project 54" system that will soon be helping departments in Salem and elsewhere: Ganley presses a button on the steering wheel, recites the license plate number aloud, and gets a full record of the driver with a make and model of the car instantly.

The simultaneous tasks of flipping on the blue lights, calling in to dispatch and hitting a half-dozen other switches are also replaced by simple voice-activated commands such as "pursuit" or other police lingo tailored to a police department's wants.

The Project 54 system, named after the 1960s television comedy "Car 54, Where Are You?" is the brainchild of University of New Hampshire researchers.

Salem will get the upgrade by next year, along with nearby police departments in Newton and East Kingston.

The cost for installing the technology ranges from $4,000 to $12,000 depending on how much other hardware, such as light bars, video equipment and radar guns, the car already has installed. Salem is having five cruisers retrofitted with Project 54 technology. The cost for Salem will be about $4,000 per car.

Ganley noted that another nice option is that components for the cruiser, such as its radar system, can still be easily removed and put in another cruiser if necessary.

"One of the things we like about the whole program is the five front-line cruisers we're having installed are exactly the same as the others," Ganley said.

The police cruiser upgrades are being paid for with $7.2 million in federal funds earmarked to add the system to 399 state and local police cruisers within the next two years. U.S. Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., a booster of the Project 54 system since its inception about four years ago, secured the money to make the Granite State a testbed for the new technology.

"One of the best advancements is that it offers a lot of safety features," said state police Sgt. Mark Liebl, who is the first to test-drive new features and prototypes for Project 54. "Police are dealing with a lot of distractions with radios, scanners, mobile video equipment, while also being expected to look for inspection stickers and decals on plates to make sure vehicles are properly registered, which is especially tough when they're coming at you with a closing speed of 70 mph."

Even better, the free hands and immediate response time from the computer are taking offenders off the street, according to William H. Lenharth, one of the system's creators and director of the Project 54 system at UNH.

One of Lenharth's favorite stories comes from a state trooper who, while on his way home from work, noticed a car on the highway suddenly change lanes in front of him. The trooper called up the plate number and learned the driver had two outstanding warrants for drunken driving and a revoked license.

Another favorite is when another officer called up a registration and found the license number belonged to a different car and the license plate was made from plaster of Paris.

"I was told it looked very good from a short distance," Lenharth said. "All of the officers we've talked to are reporting stories like that to us."

The Consolidated Advanced Technologies Lab, where Lenharth and his staff install software and equipment made by subcontractors, has been ground zero for fielding inquiries from police departments across the country.

"We've had inquiries from Oregon, California, Iowa, Florida, Maryland and Pennsylvania," Lenharth said.

Likewise, companies have been eager to both customize their computer hardware to fit Project 54's specifications and inquire about exclusive rights to the project.

No way, Lenharth has said. "We go cheap and we go open" is Lenharth's typical response to such requests. Once a department pays a flat fee of a few hundred dollars for the software, it gets as many copies as it needs.

So far in New Hampshire, 115 police cars have been outfitted with the technology, 65 of which belong to New Hampshire State Police. Rather than retrofitting older cars, state police are only adding Project 54 systems to new cars as they come online, Liebl said. There are now 11 garages trained by the CATLAB staff around the state to install Project 54 systems, and "they're installing them daily," Lenharth said.

Lenharth and his staff are now working on prototypes to expand the system -- including wireless cameras that officers can wear on their clothes, hand-held scanners to check drivers licenses and a new digital camera system on the front and rear of cruisers that can save and record the last few minutes of what it has "seen" and burn it onto a DVD on voice command.

"In some senses, the technology is outrunning us," Liebl said. "The courts are familiar with high-eights (tapes) and VHS. But what do you do with a DVD or RAM from a computer? I don't know many courts that have the device or equipment if you came into court with removable hard drive. Where do you plug it in?"

Lenharth said not all of the technology now being tested will be available right away.