it's important to keep in mind that this thing works the vast majority of the time the goal is 95% we're probably around 92.8% right now when it's working perfectly it'll still be 5% of the time not working the way we'd like it to and so our challenge is to continue to reduce the amount of time that it doesn't function to standard continuing our training because sometimes the problem is a training issue uh adjusting the expectations of our officers so they really understand how this radio works and how it works differently because our goal is to create a situation in which we are going to have far more Communications channels than we have available to us right now far more opportunities for the officers to talk in real time to each other and for more far more capacity uh to assist them should they be in trouble uh because of the way these radios are programmed I mean there's never been a situation or all an officer have to do is push a button in the radio and we'll not only know which radio it is we'll know which officer it is and where that officer is uh that's worth taking some time to get to you know being more safe than we are right now or ever have been before is worth taking a couple of steps to get to that place all right they're unsafe with an obsolete radio system and that's what they had we're replacing it with a new system that has not been perfected yet obviously but they're far safer with this than they are with a system that's obsolete we're we're in Communications with our officers every single day of the week all right there's no mystery here as to what we're doing whether we're communicating via memorandum communicating via U you know the web communicating via the SharePoint site um there's no group of officers in this country being communicated with more than ours about their Communication System those who've taken the trouble to find out more about it know that every single Police Department in the country right now that's migrating to digital is having the identical problems we're having all right they are not insurmountable problems but it is a new system and new systems whether they're being applied to the military establishment or the police establishment have bugs that need to be worked out we haven't had this thing fully operational in the field I don't think we've had them out there for a full six months yet terms if we totally have gone to this system um there is no instant Perfection technological innovation requires some degree of trial and error and uh the success of those trials and the rectification of the erors errors uh depend absolutely on very close Communications between our Frontline personnel and our technical Personnel who have to make sure those fixes get applied from my perspective the radio will be considered up and running when we're satisfied that it's up and running um this has been a seven-year process uh we've worked very hard in the last year to really move this thing along I think it's fair to say we've done more in a year than have been done in the preceding six years and it's a new technology and with that new technology there are bugs to be worked out there are issues to be addressed um I'm not satisfied or wasn't satisfied that we had sufficient capacity really here to hold the vendor's feet to the fire without some outside assistance so I took some drug forfeiture money and I hired a first class consultant one who was in fact Crossed Swords with Harrison Communications or actually with the old Open Sky system before uh purpose of them being with us is to help us make sure that the contract is complied with I think we've made enormous progress just in the last few months getting more adherence to that contract but rather than try to come up with an artificial date of when it will be ready you know it'll be ready when we're satisfied and our and our consultant is satisfied that they fully complied with the contract it'll be sometime after the fall my strong sense is that when the city originally contracted with Tao uh that owned makom that the city contracted with an outfit that was too small to service a city this big all right there's just in my experience of chiefing if you will mayom had not pulled off anything this big anywhere in the country and when I got here makom still had the contract and we were getting nowhere um Harris Corporation is a big-time Corporation when they acquired the make then when Tao spun off makom and uh Harris acquired it it has worked to our advantage simply because a much bigger company has much more resources and much many more points of contact we got to a situation with Harris where they assigned somebody practically to live here to work with us to move this along our first problem and a lot of people don't know this this there we have no options here all right Congress mandated the public safety had to move in the direction of digital technology all right we had to go to trunk systems the Big Challenge unfortunately is Milwaukee decided to be not cutting edge but bleeding edge Milwaukee became one of the very first big cities to try to make this migration quite frankly we're paying the cost of that Innovation because the technology wasn't where it should have been when we signed on the dotted line we're looking at some things we think will have a dramatic impact first we had to stop running the Dual systems it was very comforting for the cops to have analog and digital running at the same time but those two systems degraded each other's signals and sooner or later we had to cut the cord now some of our challenges getting it to work properly have been training issues but there have also been some systemic issues one is dead spots now every single system when it's new we have to identify new dead spots I mean theoretically I could take this system and pretend this total pretend because I can't let's say I had a wand I could make this system go away and buy somebody else's system tomorrow we would go through this process all over again of finding that system's dead spots our challenge is to make sure this system meets the 95% standard that they agreed to in the contract that'll never be 100% we have we had dead spots with the analog system there are buildings to this day the analog system didn't work inside didn't work inside hospitals didn't work inside some parking garages I dare say your cell phone doesn't work inside some buildings and garages that's part of the problem nobody can afford a buildout that work in 100% of our locations our challenge is to narrow the number of locations where there are dead spots finally um we've identified some issues with our consoles which are the computer interfaces that kind of make the whole system work Milwaukee bought the consoles before it got the radios operational well God bless them but by the time the radios were operational the consoles are obsolete so we had a major food fight with Harris about this I said okay this precursor outfit mayom sold us console that are no longer state-of-the-art just as we're bringing the system online and after much back and forth and back and forth Harris is providing us 50 consoles worth $3 million at no cost in order to try to expedite this we're allocating money to buy handheld radios for every person who's in operations we're taking $900,000 out of our seized asset account uh this year to buy about 300 radios and we'll buy the balance next year either out of operations or out of season assets we believe that every officer has their own programmed radio that's going to really help them with familiarity issues and also they'll only have to program at once uh I've got an obligation to make this thing work I don't have options I've got a congressional mandate that kicks in in three years and the city's already spent $17 million we've got to make it work it should work as long as we keep pounding away at it in the near term you know our officers U have an obligation to us to share every concern or issue they have whenever they have it and there's a parallel universe out there there's the universe of the cops that are writing trouble reports the cops that are coming to the super User Group committee meetings the cops that are coming to the radio procedure meetings the cops that are stepping forward taking responsibility for their actions and saying you need to do this you need to fix this we had this specific problem on this specific day and every one of those things we're on we've even set up a SharePoint sign on the computer to make it even easier right we're vacuuming up complaints we want every complaint we can get because we want to secure contract compliance and we want to make sure that our consultant has all the information they need to make sure that we get the system where we want it so that's one world and then there's the world of anonymity then there's the world of rumor then there's the world of we don't know whose Ox is being gored by the accusations made in the anonymous blog site and as far as I'm concerned that's for entertainment value there's a lot of different agendas out there regarding the police department that have have nothing to do with the communication system and if there's people out there that can use concerns about the communication systems to whip up dissatisfaction about other things they'll happily do it I just know this in the real world I have to function in not the pretend world to the anonymous blogers feere but the real world of cops with real equipment facing real challenges who are working with us to fix them we making significant progress relatively quickly and that's what we have to concentrate on we're going to make this thing work because nobody cares more about the safety of these cops than I do and I think I've got a record to back that up and this system is improving every day and I'm not going to accept this system until I'm absolutely comfortable that it is functioning as the contract said it would function and functioning in a way that makes officer safe and when it gets to where it should be ironically it is going to be a far superior system than anything that they ever had before