In Summary: 

• Last year, the Federal Communications Commission issued an order that enables unlicensed devices to share 1,200 megahertz (MHz) of spectrum in the 6 gigahertz (GHz) band. This whitepaper explores the potential impacts on public safety agencies and strategies for mitigating them.
• “Interference is going to happen,” says Mark Gibson, director of business development and regulatory policy for Comsearch. “The question is, what is going to be done about it?”
• The path an agency uses can take two very different tasks, and each has its unique advantages and disadvantages. The path an agency chooses will depend heavily on its financial and IT resources, whether it can be coalesce regional support, and the level of commitment it can and is willing to lend to the project.

Background

In Summary: 

• This whitepaper examines the advantages and the disadvantages of three approaches to provisioning an emergency services Internet protocol network—which not only provides the foundation of a Next Generation 911 system, but also performs other important functions.
• Three ways exist to implement an ESInet: contract with a commercial entity or self-provision. A third model is a hybrid ESInet model.
• The path an agency uses can take two very different tasks, and each has its unique advantages and disadvantages. The path an agency chooses will depend heavily on its financial and IT resources, whether it can be coalesce regional support, and the level of commitment it can and is willing to lend to the project.

Background 

Next Generation 911 (NG911) systems represent a quantum leap forward for the public-safety community and the citizens that it serves. Internet Protocol (IP)-based and broadband-enabled, such systems are capable of considerably more than legacy 911 systems—which is why many emergency communications centers (ECCs) from coast to coast are clamoring to implement them.

In Summary:

• Records management systems (RMS) are the backbone of recordkeeping for law enforcement agencies
• They enable agencies to capture, store, retrieve, analyze, and leverage data and information to support operations from incident and crime data to personnel files and information
• RMS technology has evolved substantially over the last several years
• To meet the demands of law enforcement agencies and the communities they serve, RMS providers have implemented myriad new capabilities

In Summary:

• The emergency communications landscape is changing rapidly and emergency communications centers (ECCs) have adapted the way that they handle 911 calls and support emergency responders
• Today, technology and science play a much larger role in the way ECCs operate — resulting in new approaches that are not only effective, but repeatable and scalable
• One such approach, known as the lean ECC, focuses on removing extraneous steps in a center's workflows to help meet national standards 
• This does not mean reducing staff — rather, this approach leverages an ECCs existing resources more efficiently to enhance the quantity and quality of what is being accomplished

In Summary:

• Law-enforcement agencies nationwide are grappling with their migrations to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), an initiative to intended to improve the accuracy, timeliness and transparency of the nation's crime statistics, which could be used to help identify crime patterns and trends, and ultimately, prevent crime.
• Numerous challenges stand in the way of NIBRS compliance, and some agencies are at risk of not meeting the January 2021 deadline.
• This whitepaper identifies the benefits of the migration and explores tactics that could help them meet the deadline.

NIBRS is expected to foster greater consistency in the data that is being collected for each incident that occurs because it has defined standard ways of describing an incidentand collecting the data, so that apples-to-apples comparisons can be made at the national level. There are several challenges that exist for law enforcement agencies, including the need to retool their RMS to comply with the new rules that have been established, cost, and organizational change. This whitepaper discusses the following: