A New Era in Public Safety

Wireless mobility is changing the way the world works. Law enforcement, emergency management and a range of other government functions are being integrated with wireless capabilities that enhance productivity, accuracy and effectiveness.

Even more exciting is the variety of new applications. Thirdparty developers have teamed with network providers and device manufacturers to design an increasingly broad range of software tools, giving public entities an ever-expanding list of capabilities to justify their investments in wireless technology.

Research In Motion (RIM), maker of BlackBerry® smartphones, has been a partner in many of these ventures, which is hardly surprising. For years, BlackBerry solutions have held a commanding presence in the world of wireless devices. The BlackBerry wireless mobility platform invites developers to push their applications and services in new and exciting directions.

Pairing with RIM to make these services available to law enforcement and other government users, network provider Sprint has brought to the table its wide reach, rock-solid reliability and deep support infrastructure.

Ensuring Responders' Safety
Anaheim, Calif., Fire Department uses GeoSpatial technology running on BlackBerry smartphones to track emergency personnel on the scene.
The Anaheim, Calif., Fire Department has 290 full-time employees and manages a dispatch center for seven fire departments. It's hard enough to track vehicles over so wide a territory, and it is far more difficult still to track individual personnel.

Since April 2005, however, the department has had this tracking capability thanks to a combination of BlackBerry smartphones, Sprint connectivity and software from GeoSpatial Technology. The department tracks selected BlackBerry smartphones. The phones it uses for large-scale emergencies are part of its Sprint Emergency Response Team (ERT) program.

Division Chief Bob Logue describes a recent scene of public protest held in Santa Ana in which he armed local police with ERT kits including BlackBerry smartphones that could track their individual positions. It made everyone feel safer.

Incident commanders and dispatchers could see the location of the phones, allowing them to instantly discern the location of any officer needing assistance. "If a guy gets in trouble in a crowd, if he doesn't have a street sign to follow, now he can look at the tracker and it will help dispatchers see where he is," Logue said.

The GST Tracker system not only tracks movement, but also pulls together location information for display on a single screen, a feature Logue calls invaluable.

"You need to consolidate it to disseminate it" among all personnel involved in a situation, he said. "To properly use this material, we needed to bring this information together in a single central server so we could break it up again in the appropriate pieces."

While Logue understood right away the potential for such location tracking capabilities, he admits it took some coaxing to bring the rank and file on board. "The hardest point may be just getting end-users to buy into it," he said. "For a lot of people, until they have a need for it, they don't really have an interest in what things can do."

That need became clear at a crucial time. "When the devastating series of wildfires swept across Southern California in 2007, hundreds of firefighters were dispersed across tens of thousands of acres under extremely challenging conditions," said Logue. "It reinforced the need to stay in contact and track positions."

The BlackBerry solution and Sprint together have attracted developers whose ideas extend beyond the simple exchange of voice, e-mail and other basic data. As this explosion of new applications unfolds, public-sector users continue to discover new ways to better serve the public.

Take for instance BIO-key International®, whose PocketCop® application for the BlackBerry smartphone allows law enforcement to quickly and securely query state and national data sources for crucial criminal information. Software maker