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Programmer Tim Clemans Resigns from Seattle Police Department After Six Months

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Re: Programmer Tim Clemans Resigns from Seattle Police Department After Six Months

#81

Post by timclemans206 »

MichaelGG wrote: post #16
metric10 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the reason he blew up was because any changes to the way 911 operators worked had to be approved. Wow. What I can't believe was that he was allowed to resign and wasn't fired on the spot.

In 2005 I was creating a national 9-1-1 company for VoIP. It's understandable why people would be so conservative given the stakes. (Though sometimes they laughably underestimate the fragility they introduce, like initiatives to hook up every PSAP to the Internet and route calls that way.) One PSAP in particular was very upset with our service. He insisted that we do not connect "Internet calls" to his PSAP, as "ther…

A number of people thought it was important software including the Chief Operating Officer who immediately had it put to use in the Realtime Crime Center. It was the Captain who didn't want to have a checklist. My bosses, bosses, boss at the time tried to get the Captain to agree to a structure that would allow stuff like this to be developed but the captain refused.

Re: Programmer Tim Clemans Resigns from Seattle Police Department After Six Months

#82

Post by tptacek »

sleepybrett wrote: post #46
kzhahou wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe he just deployed a webapp that the people in the communications center could access... I can hardly thing of a single bit of code that should be deployed in such a literal life-and-death environment, which shouldn't go through FULL REVIEW. Maybe it's a small webapp that gives a bit more information -- which leads dispatchers in the wrong direction one out of ten times. Maybe his "highlighting the most critica…

Clemens is in the comment thread. It seems like the system he wrote read out of the 911 call database and displayed all the active calls. Then highlighted calls based on keywords so the head dispatcher could more easily see high priority calls ( crimes in progress ? ). This seems very safe. The captain in question is just protecting his turf. Even if he saw the benefit he would never admit it because it wasn't his id…

The code itself might be intrinsically safe, but the process it generates might not be. The argument doesn't have to be "this code will crash the 911 system"; it might just be "people are going to get hurt when operators act on the information it attempts to generate".

Re: Programmer Tim Clemans Resigns from Seattle Police Department After Six Months

#83

Post by tptacek »

timclemans206 wrote: post #75

The software doesn't highlight calls it highlights messages with keywords. This was asked for by a dispatcher who said during emergencies it's hard to spot the important messages. This particular dispatcher's job was to monitor all of the other dispatchers and ensure that calls were prioritized correctly. The software itself did not do the dispatchers job for them. Calls are prioritized before the Chief Dispatcher ty…

What kind of messages? What kind of highlighting? What's a specific use case you were targeting? (I'm sure there was one! I just see too many of us speculating about it.)

Re: Programmer Tim Clemans Resigns from Seattle Police Department After Six Months

#84

Post by throwawaymaroon »

sleepybrett wrote: post #48
btilly wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is worse, it is not even clear that the captain is entirely wrong here. If Clemans screwed up, he had the potential to have 911 calls be routed to /dev/null. If he succeeded, the department became more efficient. However the 911 system is already working "well enough". Therefore in terms of outside perception any win will be small, and disasters could be huge. He is not the one who has been give the authority to…

Clememns is in the comments explaining how the system worked. He just reads the current calls out of a database and displays them with some highlighting. There is no write.

... until the connection pool is misconfigured or something and the writes can't get in.

Touching mission critical things always has risk and those risks have to be mitigated at a political level. If the programmer is this bad at respecting political ownership of responsibility, he has no business touching production this way.

Re: Programmer Tim Clemans Resigns from Seattle Police Department After Six Months

#85

Post by timclemans »

tptacek wrote: post #83
timclemans206 wrote: post #75

The software doesn't highlight calls it highlights messages with keywords. This was asked for by a dispatcher who said during emergencies it's hard to spot the important messages. This particular dispatcher's job was to monitor all of the other dispatchers and ensure that calls were prioritized correctly. The software itself did not do the dispatchers job for them. Calls are prioritized before the Chief Dispatcher ty…

What kind of messages? What kind of highlighting? What's a specific use case you were targeting? (I'm sure there was one! I just see too many of us speculating about it.)

The messages were by dispatchers. I'll give you an example, shortly after the center was no longer allowed to the app, someone called 911 and claimed his car had been shot. A dispatcher put it down as rock hit the car. A higher up told me that had my app been in used the Chief Dispatcher would have been alerted because they all had keywords for shot, shooting, etc. This is the only tool to see all messages for everything at once. I even asked them if they would like to hide messages and they said no.

Re: Programmer Tim Clemans Resigns from Seattle Police Department After Six Months

#86

Post by timclemans »

robwilliams wrote: post #39
tonomics wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not convinced a 'calm and rational conversation' would help either. Seems like his superiors were filled with aggressiveness and testosterone.

What makes you say that? Clemans sounds like the aggressive one.

The Chief Information Officer at the time arranged the meeting to put structure around all this app development I was doing for 911: CAD remarks keyword highlighter, instant 911 call history, immediately show call out #s for a shooting etc (so dispatchers aren't leaving their desks to find the numbers in phone books), and TAC channel registration (again so they would leave their desk). It was the Captain that wouldn't go along with the Chief Information Officer was trying to accomplish.

Re: Programmer Tim Clemans Resigns from Seattle Police Department After Six Months

#87

Post by timclemans »

gopowerranger wrote: post #65
pascalmemories wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You read the story quite differently from me. I don't think he changed how they operated at all. He gave them a program which highlighted the most critical calls for most urgent attention. That's EXACTLY how 911 operators are SUPPOSED to operate. CAD systems are supposed to do that but it can be difficult to properly do that when lots of calls come in - and when a really critical calls does come in, it frequently is…

That's not why he was fired.

I wasn't fired and wasn't asked to resign. SPD tried to keep me.

Re: Programmer Tim Clemans Resigns from Seattle Police Department After Six Months

#88

Post by jboy55 »

logfromblammo wrote: post #38
metric10 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's how they are supposed to operate. But what makes a call "high priority?" Are 911 operators actually working off this list? What happens if the program fails; what's their back up plan? What happens if there's a bug in the program, is he going to fix it or will he have lost interest? Are their regulations about maintaining a log of what was displayed in case of a lawsuit? Where's the source code, what happen…

Not knowing much of anything about 911 dispatch, this would be my short list of criteria for elevating call priority: - Caller has indicated a situation wherein a delay in the arrival of emergency responders may contribute to more serious harm being done in the caller's vicinity - Caller has indicated a situation wherein a delay in the arrival of emergency responders may result in them being unable to render any mean…

I think you're missing a lot of the bigger picture that the comment you're replying to had.

When you work on governmental projects, a lot of requirement are legislated in. 10 years ago there might have been some incident that caused the city of Seattle to enact an ordinance stating that all escalations had to be logged. Perhaps that came through the state legislature. That's not some requirement that you can 'get to later' or 'iterate' in. It's technically 'against the law' to deploy code without that requirement satisfied.

I'm not sure if the outcome of his meeting with the captain would have resulted in his banishment from working with the 911 operators if he didn't blow up at them. But, had one of my developers coded a small web app and deployed it without telling anyone, I'd be miffed, if he did it to another group without telling that group's manager, I'm sure I'd get talked to by that manager.

If that developer had gone in and changed a mission critical piece of code without telling anyone, or getting the code reviewed, if it worked, they'd get a stern talking to, if it broke the system, they'd be on a PIP.

Re: Programmer Tim Clemans Resigns from Seattle Police Department After Six Months

#89

Post by timclemans »

loco5niner wrote: post #56
pascalmemories wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You read the story quite differently from me. I don't think he changed how they operated at all. He gave them a program which highlighted the most critical calls for most urgent attention. That's EXACTLY how 911 operators are SUPPOSED to operate. CAD systems are supposed to do that but it can be difficult to properly do that when lots of calls come in - and when a really critical calls does come in, it frequently is…

> He gave them a program which highlighted the most critical calls for most urgent attention. Sounds like he changed how they operated to me

Calls are categorized by primary dispatchers. A Chief Dispatcher, the ones using this highlighting tool, used to ensure they saw messages they needed to see. The tool shows all messages at once whereas the tool they use right now can only show messages for one call at a time and doesn't highlight important ones.

Re: Programmer Tim Clemans Resigns from Seattle Police Department After Six Months

#90

Post by timclemans »

krapp wrote: post #68

Also in the Seattle Times[0], an interesting quote, apparently by Clemans: “Basically, it all went to hell,” said Clemans, describing his relationship with the department. “The problem is [the department] wants to use technology, but it wants to have vendors who build these large systems that cost a lot of money and are hard to implement. I want things to go fast and I’ve been working with people who realize governme…

The department didn't get rid of me. They tried to keep me from resigning.
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