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Officials skeptical of school safety product

Local company offers to install guidance system for police on campus as free trial

By Andrea Damewood
Published: December 1, 2010, 12:00am

Read the letter from Cook and Lucas at www.columbian.com/documents.

Citing concerns about the software’s capability and potential conflicts with state laws, Vancouver Police Chief Cliff Cook and Clark County Sheriff Garry Lucas wrote a joint letter Monday to David Madore, telling him they have “serious reservations” about being involved with his FastNav school safety program.

FastNav is a Web-based navigation software system, originally developed by Vancouver police Officer Rey Reynolds, to help police officers respond to bomb threats, shootings and terrorist attacks at schools.

FastNav was designed by Reynolds to be an improvement on the current state-adopted Rapid Responder system, which has many of the same features and information, but which Reynolds has said is too clunky for patrol officers to use. Madore, owner of US Digital, stepped in with $1 million to back Reynolds and two other co-founders.

Read the letter from Cook and Lucas at www.columbian.com/documents.

The plan had been to install the service for a free trial in Clark County schools, in cooperation with the school districts and public safety.

And though the system has been knocked by the top two officials in public safety, Madore said it won’t be the end of the road for FastNav — if they can’t launch here, they’ll look in Oregon or as far as they have to so they can launch their product.

“What’s really in question is, where will FastNav be launched?” Madore said Tuesday. “Who’s going to be the model for the nation?”

In mid-November, Madore explained to The Columbian that FastNav works like a more up-to-date and detailed Google map of individual school campuses. The company uses remote-controlled helicopters to create a database of aerial images that officers can call up via the Web from their patrol cars with a few taps of a finger.

The company also installs a secure vault on campus to hold a kit with master keys for the building, charges for forcing doors open, maps with all the major system controls marked, and other tools for quickly navigating the building.

But on Monday, Lucas and Cook sent a 2½-page letter to Madore outlining several issues with FastNav. While the concept of FastNav is “encouraging,” they wrote, until it can “deliver a complete, operationally feasible product and meet current statutory limitations, we believe it is prudent to delay any further discussions regarding our involvement.”

Madore countered that off-duty police officers have been testing the software on a voluntary basis and 18 of them have provided feedback. He said they embrace and want the product.

“The problem is that the decisionmakers that equip the officers are the ones holding things back,” he said.

Currently, only two of the 200 public school facilities in Clark County are mapped by FastNav. The sheriff and the police said that lack of complete data was their primary concern, and future versions of the software must contain the “critical mapping component.”

Madore said that’s because FastNav is in demonstration mode, and it wouldn’t make sense for him to map the whole county and then find out law enforcement is not interested. “You don’t build a million of something and then see if people like it,” he said.

The sheriff and police chief also mentioned Reynolds’ employment with the VPD as a potential law-violating conflict of interest. Madore said that Reynolds plans to sell him his share of the company within the next few weeks to eliminate that problem.

State legislators selected Rapid Responder in 2001 as the state’s official emergency response software, and have since provided $20 million to local school districts to participate. That contract was renewed last year and doesn’t expire until 2015.

Tip: you can interact with this map using your fingerscursor (or two fingers on touch screens)cursor. Map

Evergreen Public Schools is part of the Rapid Responder system, and was considering adopting FastNav as an extra precaution against intruders, said Scott Deutsch, who manages risk and safety for the district.

He said he had not had a chance to talk with the superintendent about Cook and Lucas’ letter, and could not comment on how the letter might affect Evergreen’s interest in the software. However, if the school wanted to replace Rapid Responder with FastNav, it would have to seek approval from the state Legislature, Deutsch has said.

Any system like FastNav must also be approved by the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, according to Cook and Lucas’ letter, so “it is therefore unclear whether FastNav meets these standards or if it could be used by Clark County agencies and school districts” without that approval.

“I respect the authorities at every level,” Madore said. “They make decisions, they have the right to call the shots. I respect that … if they for some reason in their own minds have a good reason to elect to not do this, we’ll go someplace else.”

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A guess at a motive

Madore in an e-mail also speculated that his staunch opposition to tolling and light-rail in the Columbia River Crossing — which included a $100,000-plus campaign in November’s elections to elect anti-tolling candidates — played a role in the rejection of FastNav.

“It makes one wonder if this is how the city plays politics by blacklisting anyone who does not support the politically correct agenda of tolls and light rail,” he wrote.

This also isn’t the first time Madore has met resistance from local officials to one of his ideas. In 2003, he offered to have his US Digital engineers create better traffic light signals on Mill Plain Boulevard and Chkalov Drive, not far from his headquarters at 1400 N.E. 136th Ave.

A debate arose, with a retired Vancouver traffic engineer and private industry representatives decrying the “dumb” technology of traffic signals. Others, including city engineers, noted that traffic signal technology — for safety’s sake — needs a mathematical model, years of testing and is regulated by the federal government.

The fight lasted more than two years and even went before the Vancouver City Council, before Madore ultimately gave up.

“We did go away back then,” he said. “In this case, we’re not going to go away, we’ll just take it somewhere else.”

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