The days of dial-up internet access seem antiquated in the world of computer technology, but in the New Orleans criminal justice system, they may be closer to reality.

“It is a system that in many respects is still operating with many of the methods of the 1950s and 60s,” said Rafael Goyeneche, president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission.

New Orleans Police have one system for tracking arrests and warrants.  The Orleans Parish criminal sheriff has his own system for tracking inmates and a separate system that tracks criminal cases. 

Add that to the District Attorney’s Office, operating on a separate case-tracking system and it makes it tough to track anything.

“It impacts every corner of the criminal justice system,” Goyeneche said.  “From officers conducting investigations to the efficient flow of police reports to the district attorney's office so that the screening process can begin and the prosecution process can begin.”

Before Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans Police and Justice Foundation started a project to integrate all the systems.

"We secured a grant before the storm from the Department of Justice for $900,000 to start the integration process,” said Heidi Unter, the foundation’s chief operating officer.

Before Katrina, the foundation received $982,000.  After the storm, they earmarked $1.6 million in new Department of Justice grant funding for technology, and in 2008 they got another grant for $220,000.  That brought their total technology grant funding up to $2.8 million.

In 2006, the foundation commissioned a study to figure out what exactly each agency needs.  The list is long.

“They use the same information.  We need to make sure they get that information in a timely way and an accurate way and it needs to be in an easily accessible way,” explained Unter.

Recent problems with missing or stolen evidence handled by police show just how much agencies need a better way to keep track of evidence.  Right now, it's all done manually.  In fact, the NOPD is just now doing an inventory of what evidence they have.

The Police and Justice Foundation is working on one computer system for police, the district attorney, and the clerk of court to all be able to track a piece of evidence by bar code.

“At any time, any of these stake holders can log on to this system to see where a piece of evidence is, who last touched it, where it needs to be brought next to what court at what time,” said Unter.

But two years later, the project is still in the design phase. Unter says a new system to allow the courts, the police and the sheriff to track subpoenas and bonds is further along.  But it is not yet fully operational because, according to the agency's latest report, the system will operate behind the City of New Orleans' firewall.  For the agencies which don't typically operate on city computers, like the district attorney's office, the report says access is "cumbersome, slow and unreliable."

“Now subpoenas, instead of being delivered in a paper form, they will now be delivered via email,” said Unter.

Another planned project is getting the detectives in all eight police districts working on one case-tracking system.  The current setup does not allow for that.

“The first district, when they look on a computer, couldn't see the active cases and the case histories that were going on in the third district,” said Unter.

For example, if a criminal robbed two people in the third district and one person across the street in the fifth district, the detectives wouldn't know to connect the cases unless they called or emailed each other.

That information is often shared in NOPD's weekly Comstat meetings among all the district commanders, but detectives don't have instant access to it.

“We can spot trends and suspects that are probably operating from police district to police district, because we know criminals don't respect district boundaries,” said Unter.

It's one of fifteen projects that the foundation is administering.  So far only three have been completed.  One of them was the hiring of a technology officer for the district attorney's office, who started work in October.  It's something Unter says should help speed up the other projects.

“This computer network that we were talking about, while it was a priority to a fully functioning and operating criminal justice system, they needed to stop the bleeding post-Katrina. so it pushed back this whole initiative,” she said.

Unter admits the difficulties in trying to integrate so many different agencies, which for decades have built their own systems, is what's slowing down the process.  But she says starting from scratch would create a bigger problem.

“We can do more to improve them by just doing little fixes to what the current systems are, and make discreet connections from one agency to another and build momentum there, so that we're not grinding the system to a halt,” she said.

“We're in the stone age when it comes to communication and the computers that we have available to fight crime in this community,” said Goyeneche.    

Just this year, the NOPD also got a $650,000 Department of Justice grant to upgrade their software and add cameras to patrol cars.

That money has to work its way through city government before the NOPD can access it and do any work.