New London — Toward the end of last year, an audit showed Hartford police reported fewer than half of their traffic stops to the state from October 2015 through September 2016. Now state researchers are looking into the other six departments that still use paper traffic stop forms, including New London, to see whether those departments have similar issues.

Under the Alvin W. Penn Racial Profiling Prohibition Act, police departments are required to report traffic stop information — why the stop was initiated, the date and time it occurred and the race/ethnicity of the person pulled over — to the state each month.

According to Ken Barone, project manager with the Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy, the ongoing audits are just one piece of his group’s mission to analyze data and ensure agencies aren’t stopping, detaining or searching motorists for discriminatory reasons.

Barone said Cheshire, Wallingford, Clinton and Middletown already have complied with his agency’s request to get copies of their paper forms. With the first three, Barone explained, researchers found the correct number of stops had been reported. They also learned each department had a good system of oversight in place to ensure no stop information fell through the cracks. They dug no further.

In Middletown, however, researchers found problems similar to those in Hartford: The state received information about fewer stops than it should have and, in some cases, got information that didn’t match what was on file within the department.

Now, only Bridgeport and New London remain.

Last  Friday, in a meeting of the Racial Profiling Prohibition Advisory Board, both departments were called out for not yet having provided the forms for the audit.

During the meeting and again on Monday, Barone said he first left a message for acting Police Chief Peter Reichard around the beginning of the year and followed up multiple times afterward. He said he left a message with the mayor’s office as well, to no avail — until Reichard contacted him last Friday.

Speaking by phone Thursday, Mayor Michael Passero said he was upset Barone said he had been unable to reach city officials. Passero said it was he and Reichard who initiated a December meeting with Barone and several others in an attempt to make sure the city was not only in compliance with the racial profiling law but also doing its best to lead the pack.

"We've been doing everything we can," Passero said. "If (Barone) had said to me he was having trouble getting the documents he needed for the audit, I would have reached out to the acting chief and asked what the issue was."

Reichard said he received no messages from Barone until last Friday, at which point he promptly returned the call. Now, Reichard said, his department is working to compile PDF scans of 12 months’ worth of traffic stop forms as quickly as it can.

“They’re asking for a lot,” Reichard said. “We don’t have a big staff to do this, but we’re going to work the best we can so they can do their analysis." 

Reichard said researchers could find a small degree of discrepancy stemming from human error. The department, he explained, uses a paper system to take down the stop information and transcribes that information to an electronic system for transmission to the state. But he doesn’t expect they’ll find more than 50 percent of reports missing, as they did with Hartford.

The audit, Barone emphasized, wasn’t triggered by a concern that police were doing anything wrong. More important, he said, was the need for good, whole data in order to turn out good, whole analyses.

“From the other side, the simple act of collecting and reporting the data goes a long way to building trust between police and the community they serve,” Barone said. “If that’s called into question — and it isn’t at this point — but if it is, it undermines some of the trust law enforcement is trying to build.”

Reichard this year and in years past has asked the city for money to upgrade the department’s computer systems. If he got his way, New London police would adopt a system similar to what most of Connecticut’s more than 100 departments use. In it, an officer can’t “close out” of a traffic stop until he or she has entered all the necessary data. That information automatically is captured and sent to the state, no by-hand transcription necessary.

Reichard has his eye on a Windows-based, user-friendly system that he said could be up and running within about 18 months of the hypothetical contract being signed. It’s one that could link into Waterford’s system, too.

The software, he said, could run circles around the 1980s IBM system the department currently runs.

“This is not going to take jobs away,” Reichard said, “but it will streamline what we do.” 

The department’s most recent request — it asked for $900,000 to install the software on all the department’s computers and cruisers and to train staff on the new technology — failed to make it into Passero’s proposed budget.

"The city knows we need to do this at some point," Reichard said. "We need to get our computer system into the century we're working in."

Passero said he realizes the department's need for an upgrade, but "New London is a poor city" and right now it's not viable.

l.boyle@theday.com