Evans County Sheriff’s Office puts new computer system in place to help fight crime

EVANS COUNTY, GA (WTOC) - The Evans County Sheriff’s Office has a new system that is helping them fight crime in their county and surrounding counties.

The system links information with surrounding agencies so they can have each other’s backs. The sheriff says it’s been 10 years since they have had a system update. He says all the cars and the computers inside the building desperately needed the update.

Sheriff Randall Tippins says the biggest update with the new SSI system is seeing where officers are at all times.

“For safety, in the times we are in today, we can look and see. If an officer doesn’t answer, we can look and see exactly where he’s at,” Sheriff Tippins said.

Since Evans County is a small department, they depend on help from other counties. By having this system, they can see if there are any other departments nearby if help is needed.

“Sometimes, there are two officers working on a shift at a time, so for us to be able to see some people and have that help if we need it is very big for us here,” said investigator Mac Edwards, Evans County Sheriff’s Office.

“Everybody can see what everybody is doing. I can look at Bulloch County’s units, Tattnall’s units, all our neighboring counties. The city of Claxton has it now.”

Edwards says the systems are in every patrol car and every officer is now GCIC certified after training a week on the new system. He says this gives deputies the ability to search the database from inside their car.

“The deputies can write citations, do incident reports, check status’ of people through GCIC, just different things like that inside their terminal inside their car,” he said.

It also shows information from other counties. For example, if there were robberies in Evans County, deputies could search other counties’ databases so see if they had any similar incidents. This will let departments work together on crime.

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