By Kristyne E. Demske
C & G Staff Writer

UTICA — With help from the community, the Police Department is going to be able to give back to local parents with a new child identification system it will purchase with mostly donated money.

“I’ve been trying to buy this piece of equipment for about the past two and a half years,” said Police Chief Michael Reaves during a City Council meeting July 13. “We had no funds.”

Reaves had told City Council in March that the department used to use a paper identification program sponsored by the National Football League, which has since discontinued the program. But since the department had run out of materials, Reaves said he had nothing to offer parents who wanted identification for their children in case of an emergency. At that point, he only had about $850 for the program from local donors.

Reaves told council July 13 that he had received a great outpouring of support since his last plea to the community, and now had enough money to purchase an EZ Systems child identification system from a Redford company — which also chipped in by lowering the price of the system from $4,999 to $3,500 after learning the department still couldn’t, after two years, come up with all of the funds.

The system includes a custom laptop computer, Logitech camera unit, free technical support, a warranty and free software upgrades for the first year. It will allow the department to take child identification on the go and give parents a Child ID Statistics sheet and a compact disc with the same material. The computer does not keep any of the information about the children on file — that is all given to the parent or guardian for safekeeping.

The computer comes with many compact discs to begin with, and Reaves said he hopes to be able to replace them at a very low or no cost when they have all been used.

Reaves said, in total, he received donations from the Target Corp., Sam’s Club of Utica, the Utica Lions Club, the Kiwanis Club of Utica, Kurt Drouillard representing Zap Zone-Beamerz and Village Square Cooperative/KMC Management Co. He said they were also able to earn more than $400 from the sale of donated cell phones and are using about $700 in drunken driving fines to pay for the remainder of the balance.

He said they would provide the service to anyone in the community, regardless of residency.

“We’ll be happy to do a child ID registration on them,” he said.

City Council unanimously approved a motion to purchase the system.

“Those businesses definitely deserve a hooray for helping,” said Mayor Jacqueline Noonan.