East Kingston Police Chief Reid Simpson sits at the wheel of his new police cruiser, a "smart" car designed by the University of New Hampshire. Photo by Tim Churchill
By Tim Churchill
EAST KINGSTON - On the outside, the pride of East Kingston Police Chief Reid Simpsons fleet of three cruisers, a 2004 Chevrolet Impala, does not look like a car of the future. But inside, it certainly talks like one.
East Kingston has joined several New Hampshire municipalities chosen to participate in Project 54, the effort by University of New Hampshire engineers to integrate the various electronic devices of a police car into a single system.
The system was developed by the Consolidated Advanced Technologies Laboratory at UNH in Durham. It consists of one computer, discreetly located in the console, that controls all of the formerly separate electronic functions of a police car. Strobe lights, siren, radio and radar can all be activated by pressing a red button on the steering wheel, once used for cruise control, and speaking into a microphone bar tucked into the drivers sun visor. The computer then repeats the voice command and performs the function.
"Front antenna," Simpson demonstrated. A quiet, male voice issued forth promptly from the computer, repeating the command, and the forward radar unit was activated, clocking the speed of the oncoming vehicle.
"Can you imagine what it would be like," without the red button, he chuckled. "The computer would be responding to every thing you and the radio said."
The $10,000 Windows-based system cost the town nothing; it was supported by a grant from the Department of Justice. So far, 115 cars statewide have been outfitted with the system.
Simpson said at this point it is especially useful for radio communication. To tune into the frequency of a specific town, for instance, an officer can issue a voice command instead of averting his eyes from the road and fiddling with the radio dial. "It saves time," he said, and "obviously its much safer to keep your eyes on the road instead of looking down into the console."
But the greatest convenience has yet to come to East Kingstons high-tech cruiser. That is the ability to perform voice-activated data queries. Currently the dispatcher is called with a license plate number, for example, and the officer has to wait to receive the data. "The dispatcher may have to deal with a lot of requests. I cant tell a driver to hang on for 30 minutes while my request is being processed," he said.
Currently, only state police have access to a comprehensive and constantly updated database.
Simpson looks forward to the day when he can read a license number into the microphone and the computer reads back to him the drivers history. The computer is useful now, he said, but it will be "much more so in the future when we are plugged into a database."