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“What we want is everyone to work in the system, from the minute you get the call to when the report or the accusations are (filed) in court,” Shuster said.

Among the problems for the police who tested M-IRIS, she said: there were too many fields and duplicate fields to fill in when typing a report.

“In 2010, it’s like we had to go back a little bit to the drawing board,” Shuster said. “We don’t want police officers to spend their time on the computer when they should be spending their time out on the road and serving the citizens.”

M-IRIS had a budget of $14 million as of 2010, and that’s what was spent up to 2012, she said, citing figures she got from the city’s information-technology department. The figures indicate that M-IRIS will cost $24 million by the end of 2015, Shuster said.

The $10-million difference is for “improvements to the system to make it more user friendly,” she said.

The MUC’s $1.65-million budget for the project included a $721,000 contract to Mobilair Integration to develop a software package to integrate the police computer systems over two years and manage the system for another five years after installation.

The Tremblay administration cancelled the contract in February 2004 after Mobilair Integration was placed under creditor protection and was having trouble meeting its project deadlines. The Montreal Police had also reassessed the proposed “architecture” of the project’s second phase and concluded it no longer met its needs, a report to the city executive committee at the time said.