Cameron County Sheriff’s Department’s patrol cars will have new computers to transition from a “Summary Reporting System” to a “National Incident Based Records System” after the department received a more than $1 million award from the State of Texas.
The purpose of the change is due to House Bill 11 of the 84th Legislative session which requires the State of Texas to go paperless. The exact award amount is $1,012,135 and the system should be up and completely functional by the end of this year.
“It was mandatory that we have this system in place … so I called Austin and said, ‘listen, Brownsville, the County, is kind of a blind area, there’s not too much money so we will not be able to comply with the request, you need to give us some assistance.’ So I talked to some of the main people over there and they gave us $1,012,135 so we could get started,” Sheriff Omar Lucio said.
“This new system is going to be that everything will come right here [on the computer]. Let’s say an officer is out in the field, he’ll take a report and he’s going to type in ‘report’ and it comes into the computer system here, there’s an officer here that may be looking out whatever it is because it is going to save a lot of time for the officers to come out here to the office and write the report. He’ll do it right there and then. “
Lucio said the Sheriff’s Office has been working on getting the money for a couple of years and did not get the information on the money until the end of 2019. He said there are about 100 patrol cars that will need the new computers and that the county also approved a regular budget of $116,154 for 25 computers.
“The county has also approved another 25 computers so that would give us 75 and then we have gone back again and they’re going to give us the additional money to buy the computers that we need so that every unit will have one of those. It is time saving, it’s paperless and it’s going to save some time,” Lucio said.
Lucio said his department also received money from Stone Garden Grant to purchase additional computers. He said hopefully by the end of the year all patrol cars will have the system in place.
“Ever since I started here, they didn’t do it but I did, I started applying for grants so we have a Stone Garden Grant, which has been very favorable to us and to many other law enforcement agencies, so we bought 25 with the grant, and some with the county so we got the rest of the stuff through the grant that we get from the state, which is the $1,012,135,” he said. “Hopefully, by the end of the year everything will be in place. We have been working to gather all this money for the last three years.”
