We’re continuing our virtual tour of Belmont’s police headquarters today, with the help of Chief Richard McLaughlin, who gave me a walk around earlier in the month. If you remember from B2’s previous post, the police HQ is in rough shape — a 75+ year old structure that’s ill suited to modern police work (even in a quiet town like Belmont). We saw aging jail cells that are becoming impossible to maintain, and a building that’s short on space for storage. In this episode we’ll look at some of the other challenges facing the BPD in its current location. Among them: the way that administrative and detention facilities are intertwined in the building (call it bad ‘flow’) and the challenge of retrofitting modern information technology onto a building that constructed in the days before computers — let alone LANs (local area networks) and the Internet.
As with our tour of the Wellington, B2 hopes that these short, virtual tours give town residents a chance to learn more and dig deeper on some of the issues that come up in discussion around town, in Town Meeting and in the paper.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t61_aL-mTU0]