By Courtney Astolfi
cleveland.com
CLEVELAND, Ohio – City Hall’s ability to get new parts for special radios used by Cleveland firefighters and the Cleveland police bomb squad expired in December, leaving some first responders to rely on technology that could endanger their lives during an emergency, one councilman said.
That’s a main reason why Mayor Justin Bibb asked the City Council to urgently approve $18 million in contracts at Wednesday night’s council meeting that will replace those radios and hundreds of others used by police and EMS, and also install a new dispatch and records management system for Cleveland’s safety forces.
Firefighters and bomb squad members require what city officials on Wednesday called “intrinsically-sealed radios” that are specifically built to prevent their batteries from exploding in fires or other emergency scenarios involving combustion.
Cleveland safety forces have been using the same radios since 2012, but technical support from the manufacturer ended in December 2023. Due to the old technology, the city can no longer obtain the batteries required for those radios, officials said.
“That’s why this is a mission-critical thing,” Larry Jones, deputy commissioner of information technology for the Public Safety Department, told a City Council committee on Wednesday. “We have to get those replaced as soon as possible.”
As part of the $18 million spend, the city intends to pay $13 million to Motorola Solutions for 1,840 radios, including the specialized radios for firefighters and the bomb squad, around 1,350 for regular police officers, and hundreds more for EMS and other first responders.
Jones said the manufacturer has promised to expedite the delivery of the special radios for firefighters and the bomb squad, but Jones was unable to provide a ballpark estimate for when that could happen.
Councilman Charles Slife, whose ward is home to many first responders, expressed concern about the situation.
For the time being, Safety Director Wayne Drummond said, firefighters who are equipped with the out-of-date radios are not going inside burning buildings and actively putting fires out. Commanders and other firefighters equipped with such radios are staying outside when they respond to a scene, Slife said.
But that didn’t put Slife’s concerns to rest.
He was still concerned that as more existing radios require routine maintenance to keep them running – and needed components for repairs are no longer available to the city – the amount of safe radios at the fire department’s disposal will continue to decline until the new ones arrive.
Secondly, Slife said, in the event of a catastrophic event or another major emergency, firefighters outfitted with out-of-date radios might be at risk of having to enter a burning building or put in a position where fire risks could lead to an explosion and harm them.
“This does have life-safety impacts,” Slife said.
City Council ultimately approved the spending at Wednesday night’s meeting.
The $13 million contract for the new radios — which will also offer GPS and other technological updates from the current version — was packaged with an additional $5 million in contracts that the council also passed Wednesday.
That money includes another $4.25 million agreement that will allow Motorola Solutions to provide two new vital software systems relied upon daily by police, fire and EMS: the computer-aided dispatch system, and the records-management system. These software systems house 911 call details, police reports, and investigative files.
Jones said the city has been searching for replacements for its existing CAD and RMS systems for years. The current software is a piecemeal configuration from two different manufacturers, and requires officers to input the same information multiple times, which makes them less efficient when they are running between emergency calls, Jones said.
The new system from Motorola will fix those inefficiencies, he said.
It also provides something totally new for Cleveland police: insight into what’s going with neighboring police agencies, officials said.
With this agreement, Cleveland will be newly tapping into the regional systems used by the Chagrin Valley Dispatch Council, which is a joint dispatch system used by 30-some Cuyahoga County police agencies that allows them to share information with one another. Cleveland intends to strike an agreement with Chagrin Valley Dispatch that will provide Cleveland with a license to use its RMS and CAD systems and engage in information-sharing.
For the first time, this will give Cleveland officers real-time data about suspects being stopped by neighboring agencies, traffic stops being conducted in Cleveland by neighboring agencies, and other information, like when police chases from neighboring jurisdictions spill into Cleveland, officials said.
Cleveland will maintain its own dispatchers with the new system and can control what information is shared back with neighboring agencies, Jones said.
As part of the $18 million spend, the council also approved $450,000 for a project manager to help transition between the old software systems and the new one. Another $300,000 is set aside for a separate analytics program related to an “Officer Intervention Program,” which is required by the Cleveland police consent decree.
Since Cleveland entered into the agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice in 2015, it has yet to comply with numerous provisions, including 11 related to the intervention program that is aimed at keeping track of troubling police behavior, and correcting it, officials said.
This new software, from Benchmark Analytics, is expected to put Cleveland “into at least partial compliance with some” of those consent decree provisions, said Leigh Anderson, executive director of Cleveland’s Police Accountability Team.
Bibb did not account for the $18 million spent in Cleveland’s 2024 budget. But Finance Chief Ahmed Abonamah said higher-than-expected revenues – including higher income tax collections – provided an opportunity to buy the new radios and software systems now, without taking out loans.
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