Gregoire faces questions over shelved database

Six years after the Legislature approved the development of a statewide computer system to monitor ex-convicts, the program remains on the shelf and indefinitely on hold -- a victim, say some of the plan's supporters, of mismanagement within the office of Attorney General Christine Gregoire.

Advocates of the program, including a former legislator whose daughter was murdered by a paroled convict, describe the so-called SMART computer system as an innovative program that would have quickly alerted authorities to probation violations and potential crime suspects.

Now, against the backdrop of Gregoire's Democratic campaign for governor, backers of the program wonder why it isn't running and question what the state got for its $1.7 million investment in the computer system.

Within the Attorney General's Office, some former staff members familiar with the system have blamed one of Gregoire's top assistants for bungling oversight of and spending on the project. One former employee in Gregoire's office says that after he and his supervisor raised questions about project misspending, they were essentially fired -- a charge the office emphatically denies.

Gregoire defends the way her office managed the program.

She and some of her top lieutenants say that the computer tracking system was developed as the Legislature requested. The system is finished and ready to go, they say, and would be running by now if funding hadn't been cut because of a record state budget shortfall last year.

"I think my folks stepped up to the job," Gregoire said.

Former state Sen. Dino Rossi, the leading Republican in the gubernatorial race, was chairman of the Senate budget committee last year when the project was shelved. He signed off on the cut and now says the program's potential was squandered -- along with enough money to create enrollment slots for 125 state college students.

"It sure would have been a useful (program) if they had focused on it and actually got it done," Rossi said. But it failed, he said, because, "they had problems apparently at the AG's office (with) mismanaging the development of the software."

"It's a complete and total waste of money," Rossi added.

The Attorney General's Office says development of the project was difficult. Not only was the system extremely complex to design -- requiring thousands of hours -- but the office said it faced additional hurdles, including a lack of broad support from law enforcement supposed to benefit from the system.

Still, that the system isn't now running miffs some of those most familiar with the SMART system.

"The AG's office had six years to do this. They had the state funding for it. So where is it?" asked Terry Morgan, a Redmond police commander who helped conceptualize the statewide database.

Former Rep. Ida Ballasiotes, the Mercer Island Republican whose sponsorship of the program helped win overwhelming support in the Legislature, said she is also upset it isn't running.

"We passed this years ago," said Ballasiotes, whose daughter was abducted and murdered by a released convict. "So yes, it bothers me very much."

'Innovative program'

The idea for the Supervision Management and Recidivist Tracking, or SMART system, grew out of a community policing partnership between the Redmond Police Department and state prison supervision officers that started in 1992.

The program worked liked this: State prison officers gave local police information about released offenders. Beat cops then routinely visited ex-convicts under supervision in their town, putting them on notice that officers were watching them.

Next, when officers encountered ex-cons -- during planned visits or random contacts -- they documented on note cards details such as where they saw them, whom they were with, what they were driving and what time it was.

Each week, police sent the reports to local parole officers for review.

"An offender's contact with the (police) officer may not have been a crime, but it could be a violation of (Department of Corrections) conditions," said Steve Marrs, community corrections supervisor of the department's Bellevue office, who launched the program with Redmond police.

Authorities soon discovered that a large number of the documented encounters showed ex-cons were breaking curfews, were in areas where they weren't supposed to be or otherwise were violating conditions of their release, Marrs said.

The program became so successful in Redmond that police and prison officers in other jurisdictions -- such as Bellevue, Aberdeen and the King County Sheriff's North Precinct -- soon copied it.

In 1995, it gained the attention of supervisors of a statewide repository operated within the Attorney General's Office that collected information on murders, rapes and other major crimes, called the Homicide Investigation Tracking System, or HITS.

Developed by former King County Detective Bob Keppel, who investigated the Ted Bundy and Green River serial murder cases, HITS uses databases and a team of investigators to identify patterns in violent crimes and ferret out serial criminals.

Keppel and Bob LaMoria, who was the HITS program manager at the time, saw bigger potential for the Redmond program -- proposing that it could be computerized, expanded statewide and used to supplement the state's violent crime tracking computer.

The two computer systems could work together -- notifying prison officers in near real time of police encounters with ex-cons, and giving police a tool for tracking ex-cons' activities in relation to unsolved crimes.

"As far as I'm concerned," LaMoria said, "it would've been the most innovative program to hit law enforcement in the last 20 years."

Getting the money

The idea won over Ballasiotes and Kathy Lambert, then a state representative from Woodinville, and it eventually received overwhelming backing from state lawmakers.

In 1997, the Legislature allocated $850,000 to start the program, followed by a 1998 mandate ordering Gregoire's office, through the HITS unit, to create it. Over the next four years, lawmakers gave the AG's office another $869,000 to maintain the program.

"Frankly, it was a surprise to me that we got (funding)," Gregoire said. "I didn't know it was coming. It just arrived."

However, according to information posted on the attorney general's own Web site, Gregoire, in fact, "directed" her office to pursue the SMART program in mid-1995.

At the time the project emerged, other state law enforcement agencies had a standing agreement with the AG's office to collaborate when requesting any police technology funding from lawmakers, Gregoire said. So when funding for the SMART project came, she said, those agencies had "some angst" that her office received that money without their input.

Still, Gregoire said, her office was resolute in getting the job done.

But over the six years it received funding, the SMART project saw one major technology shake-up, plus three changes in leadership and shifts in direction.

First, in 1997, with Keppel heading the HITS unit, the Attorney General's Office hired a Richland technology lab, run by Battelle, to design the system.

By early 2000, the Seattle Police Department was testing a prototype that seemed to be working -- albeit with some bugs, LaMoria said.

Then, according to LaMoria, came the shake-up. Senior Assistant Attorney General J. Scott Blonien, head of the office's criminal justice division, moved all technology work from the unit's Seattle office to Olympia.

Blonien said the move was "forged out of necessity." A consultant found that by moving programming to Olympia, the state could make better use of resources and better prepare HITS technology for the future, he said.

But LaMoria remembers it differently. Three longtime programmers quit because of the move, he said. (Blonien contends the programmers didn't quit due to the move, but were lured away by higher private-sector salaries during the tech boom.)

The programmers who replaced them were unfamiliar with the unit's systems, LaMoria said. Within a few months, the HITS system was falling behind -- as was work on the new system to track ex-convicts, LaMoria said.

Bob Gebo, a longtime Seattle police detective who had joined the HITS team as an investigator in 1999, said he, too, noticed troubles with SMART. "I began to get the drift that there were problems with accounting for this project," Gebo said.

A few months earlier in 1999, Keppel, the program's head, had retired.

His replacement, former Puyallup police Chief Lockheed Reader, said he found the SMART prototype didn't work, and it seemed already existing state police databases could handle the job. With Gregoire's support, Reader said, he shifted focus on development of a SMART-like program through the State Patrol's statewide computer.

Then, Reader retired in 2001.

Frustrated, LaMoria also retired that year -- he said he had warned supervisors the HITS system needed to be updated, or "I'm out of here."

"We fell down, and I wasn't going to be a part of that," he said.

Then came a third HITS supervisor -- John Turner, a former two-time police chief. Blonien said he told Turner his top priority was to get SMART operational. Turner focused on retooling the original Battelle prototype.

By mid-2003, when a reworked version of SMART nearly was complete, its funding was eliminated.

Facing a massive state budget shortfall in 2003, Gov. Gary Locke proposed cutting funding for a variety of programs, including both cyber-policing programs. Hoping to take the original system, HITS, off the chopping block, Gregoire said she explained to Locke the "ramifications" of halting each program. Her agency could finish developing the SMART system, she said, pulling it from the budget in hopes it could be activated one day. But funding for HITS should be spared, she explained.

"If we shut down HITS, we can't restart it," she recalled telling Locke. "It wasn't my idea," Gregoire added. "But we had to make cuts."

Ultimately, funding for HITS was restored in the budget, but the money for SMART -- $449,000 -- was cut, and that project was shelved.

"There was a lot of disappointment," said Marrs, the Corrections Department supervisor. "At one point, we were literally about 30 days from throwing the switch."

While funding for SMART was gone, the HITS team believed at least it had survived. But, according to Gebo, shortly after the state budget was finalized, Blonien held a meeting with the team last July. He told them the unit still was $450,000 in the red, and jobs needed to be cut, Gebo said.

The way Gebo claims Blonien explained it, the shortfall came because money for the SMART project had been spent elsewhere -- an allegation Blonien denies.

Gebo said that during the meeting, he and unit supervisor John Turner strongly questioned Blonien on where the money had gone -- questions Gebo said Blonien didn't answer.

A few days after the contentious meeting, Gebo said, Turner was "forced to resign" and soon Gebo learned he'd lost his job, too.

Turner declined comment on reasons for his departure, saying only: "The public's interest clearly was not served by the SMART project."

Gebo says he's sure his questioning about funding led to his dismissal.

But Blonien and others within the Gregoire's office say otherwise.

Turner was asked to resign because of "differences in opinion" over the future of HITS, Blonien said. Gebo's job was cut because of a "reduction in force" caused by lack of funds, Blonien said. Personnel officials targeted Gebo's position because he had low seniority and was only a part-time worker, Blonien added.

And the unit's funding shortfall wasn't caused by misspending, the Attorney General's Office said, but by salary and rent increases and by losses of general fund money. Although Gregoire's office says it can't provide a detailed accounting for where all the SMART money was spent, officials in the office say that isn't unusual.

"I will bet you there are few, if any, agencies which have multiple kinds of units within a division ... that actually go to the cost and the huge amount of time that it would take to break out those costs," said Fred Olson, Gregoire's spokesman.

Still trying

These days, the State Patrol is working with the Corrections Department to develop a SMART-like notification system in an existing statewide police computer. Some say it's a far cry from what SMART would have been.

"SMART easily could've been done," LaMoria added. "Somebody dropped the ball on this, whether it was intentional or not."

But to Blonien, the bottom line is his office did complete the SMART system, and it's now ready to go should funding be restored.

He added critics of the program's development simply weren't privy to the time, effort and money spent on the project. "Each one of these folks may have something to impact their objectivity," he said, adding some critics may have "an ax to grind" for personal reasons.

Still, that the system isn't up and running upsets Ballasiotes and Morgan, two of the earliest proponents of the statewide database they believed would make Washington safer.

"When I think of Ida Ballasiotes, and what happened to her daughter, it just really (ticks) me off," Morgan said. "This program should be in place."

Gregoire said she understands the frustrations.

"It's no less frustrating to us," she said. "We invested all of that time and manpower to develop this."

THE SMART SYSTEM

The Legislature gave the Attorney General's Office $1.7 million to develop the SMART computer system to better track ex-convicts. In a program in Redmond that inspired the idea, authorities soon discovered that a large number of the documented encounters showed ex-cons breaking curfews, in areas where they weren't supposed to be or otherwise violating conditions of their release. The SMART system is on indefinite hold.

P-I reporter Angela Galloway can be reached at 206-448-8333 or angelagalloway@seattlepi.com

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