An example comes from the Pacific Northwest, where police in Kirkland — the Seattle suburb that once served as headquarters for warehouse retail chain Costco — have started to use a cloud-based fleet management tool from Zonar to tighten up patrol car inspections.
Inspections of police vehicles don’t tend to get much attention in cop dramas.
But the activity, as unglamorous as it might be, stands as one of the most vital daily tasks for law enforcement, a checklist activity that can impact officer safety, crime prevention, arrests and even public safety budgets and departmental reputations.
As explained by Kirkland Police Cpl. Duncan McKay, officers at the beginning of their shifts are expected to check their patrol vehicles for body and tire damage, exterior and interior lights, sirens and other features as part of a “full 360-degree walkaround.”
Driver and passenger compartments, computers, printers, patrol rifles, defibrillators — all need to be checked before an officer hits the street, with results traditionally marked in a notebook via pen and paper.
That process can take time and eventually become tedious — a situation known to people who often rent automobiles and skimp on the pre-drive inspection. Intentionally or not, an officer might skip some steps, with the paper-based process offering relatively few ways to prevent that.
“Vehicle inspections are mundane and officers just get lazy,” McKay told Government Technology. “They just don’t do them.”
The result? A host of problems that can include missing things that need immediate maintenance or repair, which can lead to higher auto shop costs down the road. Besides that, missing or defective gear can put in danger the lives of officers, suspects and citizens.
Preventing all that is why Kirkland Police Department has become the first law enforcement agency to deploy Electronic Verified Inspection Reporting from Zonar, which focuses on commercial trucking, transit fleets and other areas.
Instead of paper and pencil, a digital checklist accessed via a mobile app serves as the basis for those daily inspections.
It saves time for the officer — inspections can happen in as little as two minutes, McKay said — and ensures that all inspection data goes to a central source instead of being lost, forgotten or inadvertently altered in those notebooks.
The tool also can produce photos that help agency supervisors address equipment issues “proactively,” according to a statement describing the technology.
Memories and handwritten notebooks can be faulty, after all. Digital cloud-based tools like this tend to have sharper recall — and that can make a big difference in extending the life of expensive patrol cars or SUVs, which undergo a rough, around-the-clock existence.
As McKay noted, “there was a shortage of cars after COVID.”
That came about because of chip shortages, other supply chain disruptions and inflated demand. Police departments were not exempt from those problems, which are reportedly easing, though there is concern about new shortages.
Indeed, some U.S. police departments reportedly suffer from vehicle shortages so severe that officers can’t immediately find cars at the beginning of shifts.
Making sure patrol vehicles are well maintained — something that happens via planning and regular inspections — promises to keep those cars and SUVs running for longer, which can be especially attractive given the relatively long purchasing cycles for governments. That’s one of the main appeals of the new tech being used in Kirkland, McKay said.
That’s not the only bonus, he said.
The new technology can help departments win accreditation from oversight agencies. Such a mark indicates the department operates according to the highest law enforcement standards and which can, at least in theory, build trust between the public and police.
McKay said the Kirkland department’s accreditation involves outside police experts going through the department “with a fine-toothed comb,” analyzing all types of processes, including daily vehicle inspections.
Not only can new digital tools help make the case that a department takes inspections seriously, but the digital records provide data for accreditation authorities to check, helping make the case that a particular agency deserves that particular praise.
