Helping Everyday Heroes Act Heroically
By Tom Miller
Recent events unfortunately remind us that the violent disruption of everyday routines, even the fun of a community celebration, happens in an instant. The world changes for people directly involved. A race against time and chaos ensues. Equipment resources have to be located and thread their way through the confusion. Further threats must be assessed rapidly. Even heroes have to make their way into position to be heroic. We owe them all the support we can give them.
We depend on heroes to keep our cities safe. We call them “police officers,” but their job is to act as heroes. Any seemingly routine 9-1-1 call or traffic stop has the potential to turn into a heart-pounding emergency. In a large city the routine includes some regular dose of the extraordinary. Where individual officers need to be on guard for anything, cities need to be prepared for the next thing—the inevitable disruption of the normal whether it is a citywide calamity or a localized event in a single neighborhood.
How does a city prepare to manage the extraordinary on a regular basis? How do we increase situational awareness before the situation occurs? What systems can we put in place to help the heroes act heroically—and still get home to their own loved ones that night?
Public safety leaders are wrestling with these questions amid budget pressures that require doing more with less. The common strategy is to leverage technology as a force multiplier. Many cities have major investments in technology, from traffic cameras to the many databases of information through the various agencies of government. Citizens also possess technologies that could be leveraged if public safety were able to work with those data sources. Integrating all this technology into a solution that increases efficiency and saves lives is no small task.
But heroes deserve our best efforts. It is time to act!
The answer is the creation of a real-time crime center that provides an integration point for the islands of data available to public safety and creates an opportunity to dramatically improve emergency response operations. The real-time crime center provides a point of command and control for intelligent policing and incident management. This technology can centralize all available information—voice, data, video, and other multimedia sources—and integrate them in real time within a single workflow around the incident, improving the incident command and first response capabilities of public safety.
TV shows and movies create the false impression that these centers already exist in most cities. They don’t. Many of the technologies—the traffic cameras, squad car dash cameras, the databases etc. —exist, but three points of integration have been missing.
Integration of the technologies into a solution: Each of these technologies were funded and deployed separately, and not necessarily designed to work smoothly with other technologies. That stovepipe approach was due, in part, to the lack of a logical intersection point among them; a single place where these technologies came together. No solution existed that could facilitate this complex integration of information sources into a whole that was greater than the sum of the parts.
Integration of real-time information and external assets: Incidents happen in real time. Knowing what is happening in real time is a vital asset to first responders. Cameras can produce video information that shows not just what is happening but what is about to happen. That information must be captured, analyzed and fed to the first responders in real-time. These real-time aspects go beyond assets directly controlled by municipal agencies. Private facilities have cameras. Citizens have video-capable phones as well as their own eyes and ears. Technical barriers that leave these assets outside incident management systems must be brought down. Open standards and network agnosticism must drive the specifications. Efforts to create the next generation of command centers that can take in text messages and video from the public should be viewed as part of this larger effort toward creating the real-time crime center.
Integration of information assets with police workflow: Lastly, technology alone is only a tool. Technology will not prevent crimes, capture perpetrators or save lives unless it empowers police officers to act. We must plan the flow of information thoughtfully. It is not reasonable to expect that throwing raw data, video feeds and unfiltered citizen input at a first responder in the heat of a situation is a wise or safe way to manage an incident. The cognitive processing chain of turning data into information, information into an insight and insight into action must be carefully integrated into an efficient and focused workflow process. Seeing all pertinent information in one view will help drive the efficiency, keeping in mind that the point of analysis cannot be in the field where a police officer is focused on the task at hand.
Officers in the field need the right information in manageable amounts, whether it be a suspect description (photo), call history, tactical direction, or the right video delivered at the right time! Experience, information, and direction must come together in real-time to form an effective public safety first response. The real-time crime center is the point of integration for all these technologies and workflow processes. It provides a point of escalation for any 9-1-1 call with particular risk factors and an immediate command and control center for incidents that erupt out of seemingly ordinary events.
The real-time crime center has immediate access to the vast storehouses of information in databases (public and private) of various local, state and national agencies. Perhaps parolees or someone with a known mental health history of violent outbursts is known to live at an address that comes in through 9-1-1. The real-time crime center operationalizes that information, combining it with real- time events and assets. Available assets—whether officers, SWAT teams, special vehicles or cameras, cell phone towers and other public infrastructure—are mapped and displayed, making them actionable in real time. It also enables citizens with other multimedia information to help. Experienced personnel analyze this information and guide the officers on scene. Important information can be streamed and background intelligence or highly informative video segments can be pushed to the officers in harm’s way to increase their situational awareness, enhancing their ability to safely resolve the incident and improving crime solvability.
Once the real-time crime center is up and running, it can be leveraged further. It can become part of a regional network with corresponding agencies, perhaps performing this function on a regional basis. Over time, the information produced by the center can be used to map crime and drive new smart policing initiatives. The resulting data can improve resource deployment in order to prevent crime from occurring.
Many of the technologies I described here already exist. What has been missing is the ability to integrate them within an agency’s workflow processes. That capability is here today, and we owe it to our communities and the heroes that protect us to take advantage of this technology so that we can all be safer.
Tom Miller is the director of Government & Public Safety Markets for the North America Customer Solutions division of Motorola Solutions. Prior to joining Motorola, Tom spent 25 years with the Michigan State Police Department and retired as the deputy director.