JULIA REYNOLDS, Monterey County Herald

SALINAS, Calif. — A frantic 911 call comes in, reporting a missing 8-year-old child.

Salinas officers are on the way. A mobile computer terminal in the patrol car shows them a map of the neighborhood, an icon highlighting the house where the call came from.

An officer clicks on it and a box pops up with the details.

Every 10 seconds, a colored dot on the map shows the real-time locations of all officers in the area, on foot and in patrol cars.

More icons pop up, showing a suspected gang house on the corner, the mug shot of a sex offender up the street and notes from a shooting the day before. Another icon shows a parolee wearing an ankle monitor who is among the neighbors gathering at the scene.

More officers arrive and fan out in search of a kidnapping suspect and dispatchers and police see at a glance where they’re all headed.

“Just knowing where they are at all times, you can imagine how valuable that will be,” Naval Postgraduate School researcher Scott McKenzie told a group of cops, geeks, firefighters and defense researchers gathered Thursday in a fire and police training building on Abbott Place in Salinas.

They came to see NPS researchers and Salinas police unveil a high-tech communications system that promises to provide “actionable intelligence” to officers rushing to a crime scene.

McKenzie and others who developed the array of new technology say it will speed up crime analysis and make filing initial field reports as simple as typing information into an iPhone.

The systems provide police with a “common tactical picture,” or CTP a dynamic computer map of the crime scene with a real-time view of exactly where all responding officers are, and even where they have just been, McKenzie said.

“They’ll also be able to see related incidents in the area,” he said.

The heart, or perhaps brain, of this “force locator” system is a network server that “reads” text and keywords from numerous databases and can immediately supply relevant information over a 4G network to officers on the move.

“It aggregates multiple systems into a single system-of-systems, so they behave like they’re a single system,” McKenzie said.

And, he said, it continues to refine its results the more it’s used.

“Those kinds of systems can begin to learn,” said the project’s director, Shelley Gallup of NPS. “It starts finding out what’s important.”

Gallup said the Salinas Police Department is already supplying officers with new radios that add GPS capabilities. The whole system should be rolled out during the next year.

Retired Salinas police officer Tracy Molfino is part of the project’s team and said that in Monterey County, the emergency dispatch network uses eight radio towers the county plans to have renovated by July 2013.

The towers will relay the system’s encrypted information to officers and other public safety staff.

Cities, local fire and police agencies, and the county assisted by a Department of Justice grant are shouldering costs of upgrading the towers and other infrastructure.

Well before the NPS project rolled out, the renovations were under way because they were ordered by the Federal Communications Commission under its national next-generation emergency systems mandate.

The NPS research and development work was paid for by Department of Homeland Security grants, McKenzie said.

Naval school research assistant Bobby Schulz said he recently helped test the military’s version of the system at Camp Roberts.

He said the military uses different mapping and different radios, “but it’s the same concept.”

Defense forces, he said, are using similar systems to provide “a high level of situational awareness to both war fighters and battle space managers.”

The advantage of this technology, he said, is that “Monterey County’s public service personnel will be able to efficiently use the limited resources available in achieving public safety.”

Salinas Police Chief Kelly McMillin said the city’s collaboration with the Monterey naval school began four years ago, when Mayor Dennis Donohue asked for help dealing with the city’s gang violence.

McMillin said NPS innovators were coming up with “good ideas that make sense.”

While technology is key, he said, focus of the collaboration has been on strategy and intelligence.

“We knew that technology was going to play a role,” McMillin said. “But if we start with gadgets and pretty things that blink in the night, we’re going to get distracted.”

What is “completely novel,” he said, is the system’s ability to layer into the maps any related incidents as well as community events, such as high school football games, where officers might find opportunities to interact with residents.

What makes the NPS project a first-in-the-nation innovation, McMillin said, is that the city’s new “predictive policing” technology which crunches data to identify crime hot spots and trends will be layered into in the maps.

“It’s not pie-in-the-sky stuff,” said Spencer Critchley, a member of the Community Alliance for Safety and Peace. The NPS research is based on usable, existing technology, he said, but “what they’re doing is pushing it forward.”