LIHU‘E — If the Kaua‘i Police Department’s dispatch center ever goes out of service, police and other emergency-response communications would be severely limited, KPD Chief Darryl Perry said.

“If this one goes down we got nothing,” he said recently, pointing to the downstairs dispatch center from his second-floor office in the building shared by KPD, Civil Defense and county prosecutors.

If the building needed to be evacuated due to a terrorist attack, gas leak or act of nature, there is currently no place available for suitable, rapid relocation, he said.

So, among the KPD’s goals for 2010 is establishment and installation of a redundant communications and dispatch center, he said.

The likely location for the secondary, backup system is at the Lihu‘e Civic Center, where the Mo‘ikeha and Pi‘ikoi buildings have in-place facilities like necessary wiring and information-technology support, said Perry.

Perry presented his 2010 goals to KPD in mid-November, and spoke about them in a subsequent interview.

At the top of the list is departmental accreditation, something Perry has been talking about since he became the county’s seventh police chief in October 2007.

“It’s going to take years,” he said of the process. He is advocating appointment of a full-time accreditation manager to guide the department down the rigorous road to accreditation with the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies.

That manager would also be responsible for attaining periodical re-accreditation, he said. KPD is the state’s only county police department lacking CALEA accreditation.

The appointing of the manager will need to happen as phase one of the department’s accreditation process begins, as he or she will liaison with CALEA, he said.

Phase one includes contacting CALEA, assessing KPD, establishing a timeline for accreditation completion, and determining roadblocks and obstacles to successful accreditation, according to the single-page 2010 KPD goals list.

The importance of accreditation is huge for outside, objective oversight, and many other reasons, he said.

For example, a graduate of the KPD recruit academy even with years of KPD experience would still have to go through recruit training all over again to join another Hawai‘i county’s police department, due to lack of KPD accreditation, he said.

But those from Maui, Honolulu and Big Island departments wishing to serve with KPD would have no such recruit-class requirements, Perry said during an earlier meeting of the Kaua‘i County Police Commission.

CALEA was created in 1979 as a credentialing authority through the efforts of law-enforcement executive associations like the International Association of Chiefs of Police and National Sheriffs’ Association, with goals to strengthen crime-prevention and control capabilities; formalize essential management procedures; establish fair and nondiscriminatory personnel practices; improve service delivery; solidify interagency cooperation and coordination; and increase community and staff confidence in the agency, according to the CALEA Web site, www.calea.org.

Currently, Scott Yagihara, acting assistant chief in the Administrative and Technical Bureau, and Justin Kollar, a deputy county attorney assigned to KPD who used to work across the hall as a deputy county prosecutor, are working on early KPD accreditation efforts, Perry said.

Goal three of four is the first phase of realigning the island’s beat (patrol) system, with the first phase including implementing a new district numbering system (districts to be numbered one to five to align with current island judicial district numbers).

Although he won’t initially have any new officers to staff them, Perry said KPD in 2010 will add two new beats in the Lihu‘e district, and two in the Kawaihau (Kapa‘a) district.

Beat numbers will change in the new year, to reflect the district of each beat, and sector numbers will change in 2010 as well, in anticipation of creation of new sectors in the future, according to the KPD Beat Realignment Project long-range paper.

The plan is to add at least two beats in each of the following years: 2015, 2020 and 2025.

The new beats were created by district commanders (Lihu‘e, Waimea, Hanalei) based on calls for service, current and anticipated population growth, officer safety and response time, the Beat Alignment Project states.

The plan is to increase the number of beats from 10 in 2009 to 21 by 2025.

The final goal (second on the list) is acquisition and installation of computer-aided dispatch system upgrades that will include placing laptop computers in many KPD vehicles.

Requests for proposals to provide KPD with an Internet-based 911 system are due Jan. 29, with the county seeking one source for equipment, service, training and maintenance of the system, according to a county Finance Department bid posting.

In addition to the computer-aided dispatch system, the winning bidder will also provide mobile computer-aided dispatching systems (computers in many police cars), all with automatic vehicle-location systems, according to the posting.