A decision on the proposal had been expected in May, but Detective Inspector Scott Whyte, manager of the NSW Police's Investigative Services Systems, described negotiations over the proposal as "interminable".
"It's been very long-winded -- it's gone a lot longer than anyone expected," said Whyte.
Whyte said NSW Police and government decision-makers are still trying to reach agreement on funding for the proposal.
Whyte said the scandal over the Sydney Water's failed AU$135 million Customer Information and Billing System (CIBS) was driving the government's cautious approach to opening the public purse for the project.
Sydney Water awarded the contract to build CIBS to PricewaterhouseCoopers in mid-2000 but abandoned it in October 2002 after excessive delays and budget blow outs.
The NSW Auditor General delivered a stinging attack on Sydney Water's management over the failure of the project, which cost over three times its original budget of AU$38.2 million blowing out to AU$135.1 million.
The COPS2 is proposal would be one of the most extensive IT projects Police have contemplated in the last decade.
The COPS2 proposal's ultimate aim was to make police more mobile but the initial phase of the project would require extensive upgrades to the NSW Police IT infrastructure. Police would move all its users onto newly built Wide and Local Area Networks and establishing a standard operating environment.
Whyte told ZDNet Australia that the NSW premier Bob Carr, State Treasurer Michael Egan and Police minister John Watkins were expected to arrive at a decision on COPS2 at a meeting held last Friday.
Well-placed sources say that the government has given its approval to the project informally, but that Treasury was yet to make its decision official.
However a spokesperson for Egan, said that the meeting was simply part of "ongoing negotiations" on the matter.
