As Hamlet’s new town marshal settles into his role, one of his first steps is to get the department’s technology working properly.
Clint Norem told the town council Wednesday that the police department’s computer setup has a few issues. “These are MacBooks, and everything that we use, as far as the records management, is Windows-based,” he explained. “So they’ve actually had to install Windows onto the MacBooks.” On top of that, he said the part of the software designed to log and track evidence was never installed.
Norem thinks they’re good computers, though, and he’d like to see the town keep them and get them working properly. “One of them works and it’s great,” he said. “It is a nice computer. But we’ve got two of them, and unfortunately, the main computer is the one we’re having the issues with, so I don’t know if that’s going to affect the other one over time. So if we can get it fixed, we’ll see how it goes.” To do that, the town council decided to let Norem hire Datacrates to do IT work for the police department on an as-needed basis.
Additionally, the Hamlet Police Department will not be hiring a full-time deputy in the near future. While money for the position is included in next year’s budget, Norem said he’d prefer to stick with part-time help for the time-being. “At this point, I don’t really see a difference in it because if I’ve got two officers, those two officers can’t cover 24 hours a day, seven days a week anyway,” he said, “so I’m still going to be on-call or the other officer’s going to be on-call or we’re going to have to try to figure out how to get more reserves to cover more hours.”
During Wednesday’s meeting, council members also approved the hiring of another part-time officer.
