MCP Insights

On December 8, Mission Critical Partners (MCP) kicked off its tenth-annual, two-day extravaganza in Pittsburgh, an event that brings together all 125 MCP professionals from around the county, as well as keynote speakers and several clients. The purpose of the event is to discuss in detail emerging and industry-changing topics, network, inspire, and educate MCP professionals on the biggest topics impacting public safety.

The key theme that emerged at this year’s end-of-year event was the need for the public safety community to figure out ways to harness the tremendous amount of data that could be available to first responders in the nation’s emergency communications centers (ECCs) and in the field.

It’s a crazy world right now, arguably crazier than it’s ever been. Hatred seems to be flowing in the United States like a river, and unrest no longer is something that happens on the poor side of town—look out your window and you might see it happening right across the street. People-induced tragedies seem to happen every week, if not every day, and many are on a mass scale. When they do happen, it no longer seems like news because we have become inured to them—in fact, if the morning newspaper doesn’t report on such an event, it has a “man bites dog” feel to it.

About a decade ago, I received a call that no one wants to get—a beloved family member had committed suicide. He was schizophrenic, had tried a couple of times before—cry-for-help attempts, apparently—and he wasn’t good about taking his meds, so the call wasn’t unexpected. Nevertheless, it was stunning and sobering, with all of the “what could I have done to prevent this” questions running rampant amongst family and friends.

During the decade that I covered the public safety communications sector for Urgent Communications magazine, I always looked forward to the national trade shows and conferences, such as the one that the Association of Public-Safety Officials (APCO) will host in Baltimore in a couple of weeks. In fact, I and my colleague Donny Jackson spent most of our time in the educational sessions because we felt that was the best place to learn where the sector was heading. As important, those sessions are where one learns about the sector’s biggest challenges and their potential solutions.

The concept of drones—also known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) or unmanned aerial systems (UAS)—dates back to August 1849 when Austrian soldiers attacked the city of Venice with hot-air balloons filled with explosives. The campaign largely was unsuccessful; in fact, ill winds blew many of the balloons back toward the soldiers who launched them.

Nearly a century later, in 1944 during World War II, Japan embarked on the little-known Fu-Go campaign that involved launching about 9,000 balloons laden with incendiary bombs; the balloons were supposed to waft across the Pacific Ocean and then start forest fires in the western United States to spark panic amongst the citizenry. This campaign also was unsuccessful.