The year 2020 was fraught with challenges, most notably those generated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Public safety and justice agencies from coast to coast were forced to implement, virtually overnight, new operational strategies that became necessary because employees were unable to work in their brick-and-mortar facilities, either due to illness or various shelter-in-place orders. In some cases, agencies had to rapidly execute protective measures for those employees who could arrive at work, driven by social-distancing mandates.

Considerable inconsistency traditionally has existed in terms of how law enforcement agencies from coast to coast gather and report crime data, as well as the types of data captured. The National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) was created to address that shortcoming.

NIBRS has defined standard ways of describing an incident, and collecting the data associated with it, so that apples-to-apples comparisons can be made at the national level. The idea is that, to truly have a national picture of crime in the U.S., data has to be collected in the same manner, using the same nomenclature, from the country’s largest law-enforcement agency—the New York City Police Department—to its smallest.

Many organizations have short- and long-term strategic plans.

Successful organizations have strategic plans that can be operationalized effectively. In June, during our inaugural Conference for Advancing Public Safety (CAPS), Curtis Sutton, executive director of the Tennessee Emergency Communications Board, and Karen Ziegler, public safety program manager, Arizona 911 Program, joined MCP subject-matter experts Jackie Mines and Molly Falls, in a panel discussion that was focused in part on best practices for operationalizing Next Generation 911 (NG911) strategic plans. You can watch the session in its entirety here.

Public safety agencies draw polygons using their geographic information systems (GIS) that define their jurisdictional footprints and the areas in which they provision emergency services. When such polygons abut, generally along jurisdictional borders, they must “snap” to each other; another way of expressing that is to say that the polygon borders must be coincident. If they are not, overlaps and/or gaps can occur—both are problematic from an emergency response perspective. Jurisdictional boundaries most often are in the form of road centerlines, which represent the center of a real-world road.

In April, the Federal Communications Commission issued an order that enables unlicensed devices to share 1200 megahertz (MHz) of spectrum in the 6 gigahertz (GHz) band, to meet the growing demands for wireless broadband services.

The FCC cited in its order a Cisco report that projects mobile data traffic will more than double between 2017 and 2022. It also cited an Ericsson report that predicts the average amount of data per month used by a smartphone will increase from 7 gigabytes (GB) in 2018 to 39 GB by 2024. A large portion of this mobile data traffic is expected to be delivered on an unlicensed basis utilizing Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and similar protocols.