Technology key to strategy, Hot Springs police chief says
HOT SPRINGS — Working smarter, not harder, has been Chris Chapmond’s mantra since he took the reins of the Hot Springs Police Department over a year ago.
Recounting how automatic license plate readers recently helped the department get a bead on a suspect before he even entered the state, the police chief told the Hot Springs Board of Directors Tuesday how the city’s investment in technology-based policing has given agency to the mantra.
“Without getting into a lot of details, we were able to track a suspect as they traveled through Texas,” he said. “Every time they passed an automatic license plate reader, we had an update of where that car was. As they came back into Hot Springs, we were able to follow that vehicle using the automatic license plate readers and get that individual stopped and recover a significant amount of narcotics and contraband.”
Technology is part and parcel of the crime reduction strategy Chapmond unveiled last year.
“That’s the backbone of everything we’re doing for the next three to five years,” he said of the strategic plan. “It’s what we’re working on every day when we come to work.”
Putting a vehicle’s license plate number into the LPR network allows law enforcement to locate the vehicle every time it passes an LPR, which is usually mounted on traffic signals or utility poles. The department has deployed 12 stationary LPRs and has two vehicle-mounted units.
The next generation of body-worn cameras and incar video systems Chapmond wants the city to purchase have an LPR feature.
“Every camera we would purchase for the officers and the vehicles would be a force multiplier to those license plate readers and give us that much more of an advantage to do our job,” he said.
Chapmond told the board the department’s L3 Mobile Vision cameras are no longer supported by the company’s new owner.
“We’re functioning now on a shoestring,” he said, explaining that new cameras are the most urgent of the dozen funding requests totaling more than $2 million he presented Tuesday. “The cameras are going down at a rate that we can’t hardly replace them.”
The $91,143 contract the board approved in February for 10 Motorola WatchGuard incar cameras and 10 body-worn cameras started the replacement process. Chapmond estimated a $1.2 million cost to outfit the entire department with the new technology, an outlay that may be unavoidable.
“As a nation going through law enforcement reform, every agency in this country will be mandated to have body cameras and in-car video,” he said. “Whether that happens next month, next year, it’s happening.”
Chapmond told the board the city’s $11.37 million American Rescue Plan Act allocation could pay for new cameras. The U.S. Treasury Department has yet to issue a final ruling on how the funds can be spent, but the interim final rule issued in May indicated the funds can be used for technology-based policing.
The more than $14 million 2021 police budget included $99,000 for a license to use ShotSpotter Inc.’s wide-area outdoor gunshot detection, location and forensic analysis service over a 2-square mile area of the city. The coverage can be expanded at an annual cost of $50,000 per square mile, a cost warranted by the increasing number of shots fired calls officers are responding to.
Calls more than doubled from 2019 to 2020. According to monthly reports the department posts on the city website, it has received 261 shots fired calls through the first eight months of 2021, a 96% increase compared with 2019.
The 62 shots fired calls in August were 22% higher than the previous August and 100% higher than August 2019.
Chapmond said the department has seen significant returns on its investment in the service. GPS coordinates of the gunshot’s location are relayed to officers’ cellphones and mobile data terminals, putting them on the scene within minutes. Chapmond said responding officers often find suspects still holding the gun that triggered the detection system.
“We’d love to see some additional ShotSpotter coverage,” he told the board. “We believe we have enough information now that we can justify making that request. We focused on hot spots, the 2 square miles that have the most shots fired. We can show you through data there’s probably some other areas that need to be covered.”
Knowing the precise location of gunfire has aided evidence collection, as shell casings can be found in close proximity to the GPS coordinates. The casings are entered into the national ballistic fingerprinting database, letting the department know whether the gun is connected to other crimes.
The criminal intelligence specialist the department hired has been “worth her weight in gold,” Chapmond told the board. She distills information officers enter into the department’s records management system into reports informing the allocation of police resources.
“The information she’s been able to put together, the criminal organizations she’s been able to identify, is fantastic,” Chapmond said.
He requested another criminal intelligence specialist position that can help the department parlay its technology into more proactive policing.
“Every time we get a piece of technology, our technology footprint gets that much bigger,” Chapmond said. “It takes a lot of time and resources to be able to manage all that technology and collect all that data and that intelligence and be able to put it together in a format we can actually use.”
He said the surveillance drone he’s requested would be useful during large demonstrations and tactical operations.
“We can think of a dozen times in the past where a drone would’ve been very beneficial for our First Amendment protests and things like that,” Chapmond said. “For raids, critical incidents, barricaded suspects, SWAT operations, there’s a dozen different areas where we could use a drone.”
Partnerships the department forged with local, state and federal agencies have also paid dividends, resulting in more violent offenders being referred for federal prosecution that leads to more prison time than the state Department of Corrections can mete out.
Federal inmates serve 85% of their sentences in the Bureau of Prisons before they’re eligible for supervised release, whereas state inmates often serve a small fraction of their sentence. Chapmond said in the past year, the U.S. attorney’s office in Fort Smith has netted 17 convictions of suspects the Police Department arrested. The roughly 40 local cases prosecuted or awaiting prosecution in U.S. District Court represent more than 400 years of federal prison time.
“That’s the value of prosecuting bad guys on the federal level,” Chapmond told the board. “Nearly 90% of the time you get on the federal side you have to do. We’re taking bad guys off the streets.”