_{Screenshot of the Del Norte County Sheriff’s Office new online information system.}

Del Norte County’s online jail inmate database is available to the public once again following an upgrade that took nearly three months to complete.

The new system went live on Tuesday and features a mapping tool that allows users to track calls for service. As the Del Norte County Sheriff’s Office gets more use out of it, people will be able to track police activity within specific time frames, Lt. Kyle Stevens told Redwood Voice Community News.

“We switched over, I believe, towards the end of October so it’s only got about two to three months worth of information,” he said, referring to the public-facing portion of the system. “As the year goes on, it’ll get more and more robust.”

The new Sun Ridge Marketing RIMS computer-aided dispatch system comes to the Del Norte County Sheriff’s Office courtesy of a $500,000 grant from the California Department of Justice, Sheriff Garrett Scott said. It’s the same software Humboldt County and other California law enforcement agencies use, including the Crescent City Police Department, he said.

It replaces the older system that hadn’t been upgraded in 25 to 30 years, according to the sheriff. His office’s former online information system went offline at the end of September. The new system was scheduled to go live in November.

“It also integrates our court security division, our coroners division, our field operations division, our jail division [and] our search and rescue division,” Scott said. “It encompasses all those [areas] so you have one system for everything, and it tracks your crime area to see whether crime is decreasing.”

As an example, Scott used a “pretty big crime spree” that occurred in the Bertsch Tract when he first became sheriff and included thefts and vandalism. Tracking those calls had been difficult under the county’s old system, he said.

“Statistically with this program now, we can pull that data and instantly know the peak hours and whether crimes have decreased, which they have in those areas,” he said. “It’s a huge tool, and the reason it took us longer than anticipated was because we were uploading all the old addresses and names and jail information — integrating basically 30 years of information into the new system.”

In addition to the mapping tool, which Stevens described as a heat map to track where calls for service are occurring, a new feature the public will notice is the media bulletin tab. This will replace the DNSO’s old online call logs, he said, and is expected to “populate here shortly.”

According to Stevens, the DNSO has developed an internal policy regarding what will be included and what will be left out of the new call logs. Instead of automatically updating itself roughly every hour, the new system will be updated manually. He said the sheriff’s office would likely update the call logs once a day at around midnight.

“The way it should look now is every call that dispatch generates has a call type,” Stevens said. “It’ll either be a property crime, a self-initiated activity or a medical call, or a fire call. It will have a generalized location — the street that it is on and the city or town that it is in — and then the disposition for the call, so however it cleared.”

The new system won’t make people’s addresses public, Stevens said, however it will allow the public to know how the call for service turned out, including whether officers made an arrest.

Another aspect of the new online information system that the public might notice is a lack of booking photos for jail inmates. This is due to a 2024 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling, Scott said.

In Houston v. Maricopa County, the court sided with Brian Houston, who had sued Maricopa County in Arizona alleging that the county posting pre-trial photographs of those who had been arrested violated their right to “substantive due process,” which protects people from punishment before they’re found guilty of a crime.

The court’s ruling stated that photographs are often re-posted on the internet even after the county removes them from its website.

On Tuesday, Scott said he didn’t agree with the ruling and anticipates the U.S. Supreme Court taking up the matter. For the time being, he said, the DNSO won’t be posting booking photos.

“But if there is an individual who is a public safety risk, then I’ll put those out regardless,” he said. “If I think it’s a public safety risk, the public needs to be aware and know what’s going on. But as far as day-to-day bookings, that ruling from the court has stopped us from doing that.”