Future Of Public Safety

SEPTEMBER 2018 | IMPACTINGOURFUTURE.COM

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Future Of Public Safety Las Vegas police deputy chief Andy Walsh opens up about healing a city's trauma.

DISCOVER how federal and local cooperation can keep students safe.

GO MOBILE by learning how new technologies enhance public safety.

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PASS shares its commitment to protecting students — find out how. Online

in this issue

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Experts discuss the future of public safety and the technology that's making it possible. Page 4

Matt Slinkard dreams big about technological advancements in policing. Page 4

How Technology Is Revolutionizing Public Safety Thanks to new innovations, public safety officials and first responders have more tools than ever to help keep our communities safe.

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he Public Safety Technology Alliance (PSTA) is pleased to introduce this special feature, “Future of Public Safety,” which focuses on how technology can be used to help first responders and improve community safety.

Several notable technology shifts over the last two years are revolutionizing public safety operations. The most noteworthy is FirstNet, the first purpose-built, wireless broadband network dedicated to public safety that provides “always on” priority and preemption capabilities for public safety, end-to-end encryption, no throttling, and robust applications and device ecosystems.

What this means is that no matter how congested commercial cellular networks get, public safety communications will always be

supported via FirstNet’s highspeed broadband capabilities.

Thanks to this dependable connectivity, first responders can leverage cloud applications and storage for their operational and administrative needs, streamline their workflows and facilitate access to critical information.

They can also use multiple devices (such as smartphones, tablets and laptops), giving them more time to spend in the field with the communities they serve.

A shift in purchasing power is also having an impact on public safety. Through new “as a service” offerings, expense budgets can now purchase monthly or yearly service plans that provide access to the latest software and hardware capabilities, as well as future upgrades. This will benefit municipal budgets by reducing large capital expenditures and increasing the speed at which public safety

Maggie Goodrich Chair, Board of Directors, Public Safety Technology

TJ Kennedy Chief Executive Officer, Public Safety Technology Alliance

providers acquire new technology and capabilities. It’s a win-win for both public safety officials and the communities they protect.

This dynamic evolution is shifting the public safety market from a focus on large, fixed infrastructure projects to a “mobile first” approach. It’s only logical — since first responders are mobile, the technology they use should also be mobile. For example, the capabilities now exist for first responders to pinpoint 911 caller locations, upload evidence and incident reports from the field, analyze current building floorplans on the way to a fire, access patient data in real time from a moving ambulance — and much more.

The PSTA is comprised of technology leaders as well as telecommunications industry and public safety professionals. We are a nonprofit coalition with the mission of adopting open, best-in-class,

standards-based technology for the public safety user community so that all agencies adopting these new capabilities can work together on a fully interoperable basis, thereby enabling collaboration among public safety disciplines across jurisdictions.

The common thread through each of these public safety technology advancements is this need for open standards and open application programming interfaces. These will help ensure operability among applications, services, platforms and devices, givng public safety professionals the consensus-driven, standardized, innovative solutions they need to keep their communities safe. n

Publisher Grace Butz Business Developer Jourdan Snyder Managing Director Luciana Olson Designer Chris Espino Copy Editor River Clegg Director of Sales Shannon Ruggiero Director of Business Development Jourdan Snyder Director of Product Faye Godfrey Content Strategist Mina Fanous Production Coordinator Josh Rosman Cover Photo Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department All photos are credited to Getty Images unless otherwise credited. This section was created by Mediaplanet and did not involve USA Today.

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What Does the Future of Public Safety Look Like?

Four leaders in the field of public safety weigh in on the challenges and opportunities of keeping our communities secure.

Eric Mettler President and CEO, Altergy

Scott Crouch Co-Founder and CEO, Mark43

Anil Agrawal CEO, CIMCON Lighting

Angad Singh Technical Trainer, Pix4D

How can public safety technologies improve to help agencies better serve their communities?

What challenges prevent cities from making the most of their technology today?

Eric Mettler : Technology, like fuel cells, provides improved reliability and longer runtime, enabling the network to ride through multiple days of a power outage, rather than just hours with legacy technology.

Anil Agrawal: Today, the biggest challenge is that technologies function in silos. To be the most effective, technologies need to be integrated and managed from a central location.

What challenges prevent public safety from making the most of their technology today?

What do you hope to see for the future of the public safety space?

EM: Organizations naturally tend to resist change — quiet, clean technologies like fuel cells have been available and proven for well over 10 years!

AA: A rollout of a safe cities canopy that would improve safety, but also allow safe experimentation with new technologies.

CIMCO’s NearSky™ platform provides the foundation to build this canopy.

What is the biggest challenge facing public safety agencies today?

How are drones impacting the public safety space?

Scott Crouch: So many challenges facing public safety agencies today are symptoms of a much larger problem — poorly designed legacy software. The underlying architecture of these decades-old systems makes it quite difficult to collect and share the data necessary to quickly and effectively respond to a 911 call, investigate violent crime or tackle a community challenge in collaboration with other government agencies.

Angad Singh: Drones are flying cameras whose images can be used to make realistic 3-D models and maps via the science of photogrammetry. For search and rescue and critical incident management scenarios, these maps can help find missing persons or manage where to place personnel. The 3-D models are used for accident reconstruction, providing a fast, efficient and safe way to provide a historical record of an event.

What about hardware, and its increasingly significant role in data collection?

What do you hope to see for the future of the public safety space?

SC: More and more cities are adopting body cameras, drones, CCTV cameras and other kinds of multimedia capture devices to assist with public safety operations. While these hardware tools are essential to investigations, any data they collect is ultimately stored in a software application. Agencies should seek out software platforms that sync with any device, so they aren’t locked into a closed system. True platforms are not walled gardens.

AS: I hope to see all public safety officials and volunteers in the field able to quickly and safely deploy drones for accident reconstruction, critical incident management and search and rescue scenarios. This technology can make our public safety officials’ jobs safer, making everyone’s lives safer.

Dreaming Big: The Future of Technology and Policing Matt Slinkard — part of the Investigative and Special Operations in the Major Cities Chiefs Police Association — chats with us about technology and public safety.

What potential do you see for technology in the public safety space?

The potential is limitless. The public safety work space is no different than the private sector in this regard. What we must do in public safety is dream big regarding the technologies that we want to see emerge in the marketplace, which will then position first responders — and particularly policing — to enhance community relations, strengthen trust and accountability, demonstrate genuine transparency, truly impact efficiency and continue to enhance officer safety and wellness.

How can public safety agencies prepare themselves for emerging technologies?

Technology integrations and implementations typically don’t fail because the technology was flawed. They fail mainly due to a lack of training, lack of employee willingness to accept and embrace the change and lack of input at all levels.

Like Peter Drucker has said, “Culture will eat strategy for breakfast every day of the week.” You might have the best strategy to implement a new technology to revolutionize the way you accomplish some aspect of your job, but if the culture is resistant, it will likely fail.

Leaders must prioritize the needs of their agencies against real fiscal limitations while always remembering the goal is to implement achievable, smart technology advancements that at the end of the day help us serve citizens. We should dream about the future and what technologies will help the next generation of first responders. Dreaming is good. It signifies that you are trying to improve. n

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as Vegas police deputy chief Andy Walsh was the commanding officer during the tragic events of October 1, 2017 — the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.

For Walsh and his staff, the trauma will leave lasting scars, but he knows that they can come together to heal.

“It was a watershed event,” Walsh explains.

“Something that you truly never overcome. We have to be vigilant every day to ensure that when our people are suffering, we utilize every available resource to assist them in coping with this tragedy. We have to remove titles, stigmas and barriers so they are comfortable to ask for help. We have to apply the same logic to our community, the impact on them, and be there if they need us to help them cope with what happened.”

Healing deeper wounds Walsh has a strong sense of civic duty, and he’s committed to helping his community heal — not just by providing the resources for recovery, but by making positive and holistic changes in his city. He notes the opioid crisis and the national epidemic of mass shootings as key issues that must be tackled proactively.

Preventing School Violence Is a Team Effort

Thomas J. Gentzel Executive Director and CEO, National School Boards Association

Las Vegas Police Deputy Chief on Healing His City’s Trauma In the wake of the 2017 tragedy, Andy Walsh of the Las Vegas Police Department talks about how police can act as a positive force for change.

“There’s a stark contrast between the amount of money that is spent on enforcement, investigations and health care related to overdoses versus how much is invested on education and treatment. Our efforts need to shift to a model that focuses on prevention. This is the clearest example of our inability to arrest our way out of our problems. ” Walsh cites homelessness as a similar issue, where law enforcement is unfortunately seen as the sole solu-

tion to the problem, with jails substituting as homeless shelters.

Looking to the future Overcoming these issues won’t be simple, but Walsh is confident that a community-driven, transparent police force can go beyond law enforcement, and instead address the deeper issues in our society that lead to crime.

“The challenge for law enforcement is how to be the driver of solutions to this

issue, and to be the head of a collaborative effort of service providers, elected officials, health care professionals and community members.”

Walsh hopes to leverage new technologies like body cameras to increase trust in police officers. But, most importantly, he wants his police force to help drive social change, not prop up a flawed system.

Dash Lunde

When student safety is at stake, federal policymakers must work with local communities.

As the academic year begins, students and their families may find themselves concerned about the safety of their schools. After 22 school shootings in the first half of 2018 alone, their worry is reasonable.

The National School Boards Association believes that the federal government has a role to play in providing resources to promote local school safety. These include school resource officers, school counseling, emergency preparedness and response training, interagency coordination and comprehensive resource guides on available federal assistance. We also support greater, sustained federal funding that expands access to mental health resources.

When schools are actively invested in the well-being of their students, and when local experts can exchange information about potential mental health or psycho-social needs, schools and communities are more prepared to intervene before mass violence happens. Additionally, recovery plans should be developed and maintained with appropriate local, state and federal agencies.

School leaders and teachers are held accountable for the results they deliver.

We should expect no less of federal policy makers, especially when the safety of our children is at stake. n

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