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Topics: Cybersecurity, Network Management
Everyone at MCP is passionate about the public safety and justice communities and their critical missions. They also are passionate about things in their personal lives. Howard Miller, the firm’s new senior recruiter, is no exception – he is passionate about helping the less fortunate, especially children.
One of his favorite endeavors was the creation of the “Shop with a Badge,” program when he was a senior public relations officer for the Brookhaven, Georgia, police department. The program, which still exists and also involves the city’s fire/rescue and emergency medical departments, provides $200 stipends to low-income children that they can spend at Target, which is a sponsor.
Topics: Life at MCP, Meet Our People
On Friday, December 17, Laurie Flaherty, the longtime coordinator of the National 911 Program, will retire. That will be a sad day for the 911 community and for me personally. I first got to know Laurie when I was editor-in-chief of Urgent Communications. Our paths crossed often over the years at conferences, usually when I was covering an educational session where she was speaking. Inevitably, I would make a beeline to her as soon as the session ended, at which time she would patiently answer every question that I had, generously giving me all of the time that I needed.
Having attended dozens of educational conferences over the decade that I served as editor-in-chief of Urgent Communications and Fire Chief magazines, I know an excellent one when I see it—and I can report without fear of contradiction that the second-annual Conference for Advancing Public Safety (CAPS)—being presented by Mission Critical Partners (MCP) on June 15-16—is shaping up to be an excellent educational event.
Over the last two decades, I have written now and then about a relative who was a career firefighter for the city of Chicago. I am writing about him again today because he’s the reason I’m so excited about a panel discussion that I’ll be moderating in a couple of weeks during MCP’s second-annual Conference for Advancing Public Safety (CAPS).
Now that the Centers for Disease Control have determined that it is safe to travel for those who have received the COVID-19 vaccine, that’s just what Darrin Reilly, MCP’s president and CEO, has been doing, visiting clients from coast to coast. Recently, MCP Insights chatted with him to discover what he has learned during his travels.
March is designated as Women’s History Month. Coincidentally, on April 3, the Brazos Valley Council of Governments (BVCOG) celebrates its 30th anniversary. So, we thought it would be more than appropriate to chat with MCP client Anita Pitt, BVCOG’s 911 program director, who has been at the helm every step of the way and is considered one of the public-safety sector’s leading innovators. From humble beginnings, BVCOG’s 911 program today supports seven emergency communications centers in southeast Texas that serve a population of about 125,000.
Over the last two years, Mission Critical Partners has grown significantly through acquisition, starting with Athena Advanced Networks in 2018, and continuing with Black & Veatch Public Safety and URL Integration last year. Last month, MCP announced its latest acquisition, Seattle-based MTG Management Consultants. The subject-matter experts who are joining MCP will enable us to better serve clients in the public-safety and justice communities by helping them enhance data integration and address their technology challenges.
We surveyed MCP’s subject-matter experts earlier this year on the biggest trends impacting public safety right now, and asked for their insights on what they believe will happen in the near future. Here is what they said:
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.
Topics: Next Generation 911 Networks, Operations, Staffing, Land Mobile Radio, Public Safety, Mission-Critical Facilities, Cybersecurity, Shared Services, Network Management, IT and Network Support, Law Enforcement, Data Integration and Analytics, 911 and Emergency Communications Centers, Fire and EMS, Conference for Advancing Public Safety
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.
How can we support your mission? From design and procurement to building and management, our national team of experts is here to help…because the mission matters.
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