The jet will be taking off to Alaska in a week, so the new Inventory and Personnel systems are moving along pretty well now. Nice to be on schedule!

Skagway's new Inventory system will track anything and everything the PD desires to follow, from when they buy it, to when it is assigned to an officer, and when it comes back for its next assignment. Barcode features will minimize typing and make it easy to keep track of where things are. All this is designed as a response to Alaska's state accreditation requirements, and will put the Skagway PD right where they want to be.

Inventory and Personnel records will be tightly integrated as well, allowing supervisors to see at a glance what is assigned to any particular officer. In the event that things require periodic qualification or calibration actions, that information will be available at either the item or the assigned officer's record.

While we're at it, we're enhancing the training records for personnel and moving the personnel files themselves more fully into various PolicePro operations.

Two guys doing their job have been killed in upstate New York in the last two days. What the hell is going on in this - and every other - state?

A 10 year NYSP trooper, Andrew Sperr, out of SP Horseheads, was shot and killed by two idiots who had just robbed a Chemung County bank - which the trooper apparently did not know about - when he stopped to check their suspicious vehicle by the side of the road. Trooper Sperr managed to return fire and shot both of them. They were arrested separately when they showed up at two Elmira hospitals whining about gunshot wounds.

The day before, Wednesday, March 1, New Hartford PD officer Joseph Corr was shot and killed while chasing yet another worthless bastard who had - you guessed it - robbed a jewelry store. A vehicle chase ended with the robbers crashing their car into a gas station, and in the ensuing foot pursuit of one of them, officer Corr was killed. Corr was all of 30 years old, with six years on the job.

In the only bit of good news in the whole story, the person who killed Corr was killed himself the next night in a battle with cops in Chester, Pa - but not before shooting a US Marshall, though not seriously.

Governor Pataki - from his hospital room in New York City, where he is recovering from two surguries - is coming out strongly for getting the death penalty law back on the books in connection with killing police officers. While I doubt it would deter so-called people like these from shooting at the cops, it would be nice to see them removed from the world afterwards, at least.

So it doesn't matter if you do this work on a 26 officer job out in Oneida County or in the South Bronx or East LA - it's all the same, every time you get out of the car or approach anyone you don't already know. Be careful out there. I was lucky to get through 27 years pretty much unscathed. It is a damn shame that so many good people aren't.

The site is out in the world as of today, March 1. Over the past few weeks while under development, it's been hiding in a private directory... the basic navigation from the existing Steamboat Data/former PolicePro site is in, though that will change a lot over the next two weeks. Now the page counter might actually start to show some activity...