By Ragnar Haagen

PAPS takes third place in North America

May 27, 2012 | 12:27 PM

Some members of the Prince Albert Police Service were recently recognized for their skill and expertise, but it wasn’t for their work on the street, it was for their work behind the scenes.

They are the unsung heroes behind the badge and indispensable to police detachments around the world – they’re the Information Technology guys.

Manager Ronald Anderson and Systems Programmer/ Analyst Tony Hon of the PAPS’s IT staff recently took third place at the annual Versaterm Public Safety Innovation Awards for their “Community Mobilization – Early Offender Intervention” project.

“It all stemmed from the trip to Scotland with the multi-agency team over a year ago,” Anderson explained.

“What they were doing in Scotland is they were keeping an excel file of any interaction they had with individuals and then they had some calculations and it would basically reorder itself to bring forward the individuals who were most at risk and needed an intervention or sorts.”

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Anderson said he brought that concept back with him from the trip and together with Hon, created an idea for an automated version. They set up an export from their record system to a web based tool that scores a value on each interaction a person would have with a police service. These scores would be based on the role the person played in the call.

Through a complex algorithm, these numbers are tracked and used as risk categories for crime or the victimization of crime.

“We can take a time frame, say 365 days and it will give us the individuals who according to the system would require attention … either through a criminal response for investigative purposes or to intervene on them so their risks don’t get worse,” Anderson said.

“What often comes to the top is a young person who’s been picked up for (minor offences). So not exactly where they’re a criminal, but they’ve had interactions where they’re a high risk of either being a victim or being an offender and we forward that information to officers in the community mobilization team.”

Officers will then intervene on that young person or other people at risk and try to improve their situation and prevent them from becoming either a victim or an offender.

This system was impressive enough to garner the attention of Versaterm, a company that makes the systems, which manage the police records of many detachments across North America.

“They had 17 cities submit applications for their projects, and from there Versaterm judges the projects and awards prizes for the top three projects, and we managed to sneak in and claim third prize,” Anderson said.

“It’s surprising, but we’re quite happy about it. I’ve got to say that most of the grunt work was done by Tony; he’s the gifted one as far as the programming goes. But it’s quite nice to be recognized, especially because this project was done with no budget, we just used the tools and information that we had on hand. Being able to score that high without being able to throw any money at it was a big win.”

The Vancouver Police Department took first place for their project “Integrated Riot Protection Team”, and second place was won by Sacramento, CA for “Firearm Ammunition Registration and Tracking”.

The team of Anderson and Hon will receive their award at the annual Versaterm Conference, held this September in Niagara, Ont.

rhaagen@panow.com