Wichita police have a records problem — and it’s led to a warning from the state
A state official has told the Wichita Police Department that the city could lose out on millions of dollars in road funding if a major backlog of reports isn’t resolved.
In response, the city has brought in extra staff and authorized overtime to help address the situation.
The problem is with crash reports, which police fill out after a wreck. The reports detail what happened and who was involved.
Insurance companies use the reports when a claim is made and local officials use the data to look for trends and problematic areas for wrecks. State and federal officials use the data to steer funding for safety and road improvements.
But getting the data to the Kansas Department of Transportation has been a problem since the police department replaced its records-keeping system in April 2021 with the NicheRMS365 system — at a cost of $2.7 million. And problems with submitting crash reports have persisted since then.
The new system doesn’t alert officers when fields in the crash report have missing or wrong information, such as an address that doesn’t exist, according to city manager Robert Layton.
The problem of incomplete or faulty reports is causing a backlog of submitting reports to KDOT.
Thousands of delayed reports led the city to miss an April deadline for 2021 reports. KDOT extended the deadline to September, which the city was able to meet.
However, the city is now working to address the 4,000-report backlog of this year’s crash reports.
City officials have moved staff, hired temporary employees and approved overtime pay to address the backlog, Layton said. A city spokesperson said it is expected to cost $15,000 for the temporary staff and overtime.
‘Losing out on millions of dollars’
In July of this year, the department was more than 1,5000 crash reports behind for submitting 2021’s reports when KDOT Director of Planning and Development Chris Herrick warned of the funding loss.
“If there is no fix, the City of Wichita risks losing out on millions of dollars of infrastructure improvements from both federal and state funding sources,” Herrick said in a July 6 email to police officials.
The Eagle obtained more than a year’s worth of emails between KDOT and the city. The city manager’s office was first included in the emails on July 14, the day after an Eagle reporter reached out to KDOT.
The Police Department had already put extra staff on the problem, emails show, but Layton said that once the problem came to him, he brought in additional temporary staff and approved overtime.
‘Not exactly user friendly’
Before approving a contract with NicheRMS365 in 2018, Wichita City Council members asked former Deputy Chief Anna Hatter if the records system would have any problems interacting with other departments’ systems at the state and local level.
She said they have considered that and it “should not be an issue going forward.”
The council approved the new system in August 2018. Hatter said the system would launch in the third quarter of 2019, but it was delayed until April 2021.
Problems started right away.
By June 2021, a KDOT crash data analyst wrote Tessa Morris, an accident review officer with the WPD, that the state was missing their reports on 12 fatal accidents from that year. The KDOT employee included a list of fatal crashes with the date and either the age of the victim, name, area of crash or some combination of the three.
A week later, Morris replied with attachments of some of the reports. She said all the others were done in Niche, which she wrote is “not exactly user friendly.” Morris said she would email PDF copies of the rest of the reports when she finished them.
Despite the reports being WPD cases, Morris asked the KDOT official for more details on a couple of the fatalities. The official responded with a copy of a news article for one and a brief description of the other, saying it could possibly be a Sedgwick County case, but they weren’t sure.
A month later, KDOT Crash Data Unit Manager Michael Ronin wrote Morris asking about when crash reports would start to be sent regularly again.
“We noticed submission has decreased significantly,” he said.
But issues persisted.
By January, Ronin was expressing stronger concerns. He wrote Morris asking for the person he could talk to about the “lack of reporting.” He sent a chart that showed the WPD reported 7,892 crashes for 2019 and 5,929 for 2020 – but had submitted only 1,617 so far for 2021.
“We show your agency as not having submitted approx. 5k+ crash reports for 2021 and will definitely disrupt our operations and any construction projects you have in your area for next year as it will take several months for us to catch these up,” he wrote.
Wichita had more than 6,000 crash reports for last year.
The next day, Ronin sent another email, this time to Morris’ supervisor, Sgt. Keith Fort, saying: “Please ensure that Wichita PD submits crash reports per state statute timelines of 10 days after investigation moving forward.”
In March, Ronin wrote to Morris saying reports did not have addresses, had incorrect dates and some had conflicting reports about the amount of damage.
Several days later, KDOT Transportation Safety Data Section Manager Jim Hollingsworth wrote an email to Morris with the subject line “My Apologies.”
“I was not happy with the tenor of our meeting,” he said. “It was not our intent for the meeting to take on a tone of placing blame for data issues … Wichita PD provides our largest volume of crash reports and we very much want to be on the same page with our law enforcement partners with regard to crash reporting.”
Nine days ahead of the April 30 deadline to submit the 2021 reports, Ronin asked how many reports they had left to submit. Detra Wilson, with the WPD traffic bureau, replied that there were around 1,700.
Four days before the deadline, Morris emailed Ronin.
“We will not be finished with (the) remainder of the 2021 crashes by the end of the week like you requested,” Morris wrote on April 26. “Our Captain advised us to send them back to each individual officer to make their own corrections. We started making the corrections, but the process is entirely too time consuming in Niche for only two people to handle in this short amount of time.”
Deputy Chief Chester Pinkston, who oversees the crash reporting, and Assistant City Manager Donte Martin started being included in the emails in July.
An email a KDOT official sent to Martin and other city officials that month highlighted some of the issues with reporting crashes. The official wrote that no verifications of data exist in the new system, it’s “very challenging” to go back and correct errors and that fixing the issues is not a high priority for the company that created Niche.
The company, Niche, did not respond to requests for comment from The Eagle.
The KDOT email to Martin also says the WPD reached out to Johnson County, which also has Niche and has similar issues, but it’s “unlikely” Johnson County’s solution to the problem would work in Wichita. Officials at Johnson County did not respond to questions from The Eagle.
Next steps
The city is currently about 4,000 crash reports behind for 2022. Layton said they are committed to getting the crashes in on time.
One way that is going to happen is by having officers enter crash data directly into the KDOT system starting in late October. Staff will then enter that data into Niche. City staff is also working to build an interface, expected to be completed by the first few months of 2023, that will allow Niche and the KDOT system to communicate.
Layton said it’s common to have problems when starting a new records system of this size. Police also had problems entering data with the old system, he said.
But it wasn’t ever at the level as it has been with Niche. A city spokesperson said the old system was typically 800-1,000 reports behind. The police department had gotten several thousand behind for last year’s report and are currently that far behind on this year’s.
KDOT “simply saying” they would miss out on millions of dollars was enough to let the city know how serious things were, Layton said.
During a Sept. 16 interview, Layton said the only other problems he has heard about Niche has to do with the system connecting to municipal court as it also underwent installing a new records system, and with Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Office records. Neither rose to the level of the problems with KDOT, he said.
Layton said he’s having an internal audit done to see if Niche met its side of the agreed-upon stipulations in their contract. The audit findings would be open to the public.
“I have nothing to hide,” he said. “If it’s not working in certain areas … we’ll let you know.”