Chief Charles H. Ramsey
Metropolitan Police Department, Washington, DC
With me today are several key members of my Y2K team:
- Assistant Chief Ronald Monroe, Regional Operations Command, North - Chief Monroe is responsible for contingency planning in terms of police operations
- Director Penny Steinhauer, Information Technology Division - She is responsible for the critical IT systems I will cover today.
- Commander David McDonald, Criminal Justice Information Division - Commander McDonald has responsibility for all non-IT matters—everything from emergency communications, to facilities and fleet, to breathalysers and office supplies.
The so-called "Millennium Bug" presents a unique set of challenges for the Metropolitan Police Department. Like other large organizations, we must find and fix potential problems in our information systems, and we must develop backup plans should those systems fail. At the same time, we have the added—and truly awesome—responsibility of ensuring public safety ... should other critical systems outside our immediate control suffer Y2K failures of their own.
Planning for both of these contingencies is an enormous undertaking. And, quite frankly, like the District government as a whole, we got off to a late start. But we have assembled a strong team that is very talented and dedicated to seeing the MPDC—and the District as whole—succeed in meeting the challenges posed by the Y2K bug. And this team has put together a solid and thoughtful plan of action for addressing the critical components of our Y2K responsibilities. This morning, I will outline for you the highlights of those plans.
But before I get into the details, I do want to raise one issue that I will return to throughout my comments this morning. That issue involves procurement. Many critical aspects of our Y2K plan are reliant upon the speedy and efficient procurement of goods and services—including hardware, software and human talent. If our Department—indeed, if the entire public safety infrastructure—is to meet our deadlines around Y2K planning and implementation, we must have the full support of the District’s Office of Contracting and Procurement. That support must involve not only the timely procurement of goods and services ... but also assurances that we can contract with the vendors we know can do the job. In some instances, that may require us to bypass the lowest bidder in favor of the highest quality bidder.
For us to succeed in making our critical systems ready for the Year 2000, we must have both speed and flexibility in the procurement process. This issue is too important, and the deadlines too inflexible, for anything less.
On the Information Technology side, we have eight critical projects under way, which I will touch on briefly. The first two ... and probably the most critical ... are CJIS—our Criminal Justice Information System—and WALES—the Washington Area Law Enforcement System. These two systems maintain all arrest and criminal history information, and provide access to gun and property registrations and Department o Both CJIS and WALES are quite old and outdated, and both are in the process of being replaced with a new, integrated records management system. But the new system will not be ready before the end of the year, so we have begun remediation to make the current systems compliant, which would include revising the current code and testing applications in the new environment. Right now, we are in the final stages of crisis management—where necessary hardware and operating systems are replaced, and existing code is evaluated. We expect to have both CJIS and WALES ready for final testing in October and November—assuming, of course, that key procurements are completed on time. While I am confident these systems will be operational on January 1 ... as a backup we will literally print out copies of the existing databases, so they can be searched manually.
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