HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — Houston city leaders said they can’t guarantee a program purchased for millions of dollars in 2023 will be ready to use until late 2026.
The police record management system, or RMS, stores important police records, such as incident reports, which contain information about victims, suspects, and crimes.
This system was at the heart of a massive police scandal last year, in which over a quarter of a million incident reports, many with workable leads, were never investigated because of how the reports were coded in the system.
ABC13 reporting in 2024 found the City of Houston purchased a new records management system in 2023 for $31M. It should have been ready for the Houston Police Department to utilize in late 2024, but the launch was pushed back to early 2025. Now, Eyewitness News is being told it will maybe be ready in late 2026.
“The new go-live date for RMS is October 2026, so about a year from now. We do have more confidence, but we do have plenty of concerns. This is why we are hedging with the additional spending authority if it is needed,” Houston Police Chief Data Officer Melissa Cummins said.
Cummins said she anticipates spending over $24.5M to get this project across the finish line. That money is already allocated and would be used to extend the contract for the current outdated record system while the city pushes back the launch of the new system, purchases the necessary hardware, and completes the crossover from one server to another.
We asked councilwoman Amy Peck what Houstonians should think about the city pouring money into a system that can’t be used right now.
“We have to be good stewards of the tax dollars and make sure anything we are implementing that it’s needed and necessary and this system definitely we do put more money into it but our old system is not working and we would have to spend a lot more money to get the current system up in order vs spending money on the new system,” Peck said.
So why the delays? The IT presenters told a city public safety committee on Monday that they didn’t keep proper records, and as people involved in the project retired or moved on, they didn’t have what they needed to get new employees caught up fast enough to meet the launch date.
What records didn’t they keep? We don’t know. ABC13 asked for a chance to ask follow-up questions, but were refused and told to contact the Mayor’s office. We sent the Mayor’s spokesperson a list of questions, who said they reached out to the IT team but had not heard back at last check.
The IT department said it is also trying to fix hiccups in the new system. Right now, multiple agencies can get into the RMS system to help investigators or prosecutors, but the new one might not be as flexible. ABC13 reached out to the DA’s office, which said it is aware of the change but does not anticipate any roadblocks
The IT team said on the upside, the new RMS system cannot be customized like the old one, which allowed the coding scandal to balloon the way it did.
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