Public safety thrives on faster, more accurate data management, officials say
Holyoke, Massachusetts peeterv via Getty Images
Public safety departments in Massachusetts are embracing a more innovative operations platform in order to boost their response times and data capabilities, officials say.
In Massachusetts, the public safety sector is getting a modernization makeover. Public safety agencies across the state have transitioned from outdated legacy systems to a cloud-based and artificial intelligence-enabled platform in a bid to improve response times, streamline records management and enhance cross-agency collaboration.
One such agency is the Holyoke Police Department — located about 10 miles north of Springfield, Massachusetts — which has leveraged 30-year-old infrastructure that relied on manual, paper-based processes before the agency began its modernization push over the last 18 months, said Officer Stephen Norton.
Previously, the city’s case, dispatch and records management systems operated separately. This model led to duplicate and redundant efforts, like data entry or report writing, impeding efficiency and accuracy in operations for dispatchers and officers, before HPD adopted an operations platform from the public safety tech provider Mark43, Norton explained.
“They’re all under the same umbrella now, rather than [in] three separate, distinct systems” that “didn’t always talk to each other,” said HPD Chief Brian Keenan.
The new Mark43 system has integrated the disjointed platforms to a cloud-based environment that enables a “seamless transition” for the collecting and sharing of data from the moment a call is received to recording and following up on a case, Norton explained.
If a phone call comes into the dispatch center, and the agent needs to get information, like a license plate number, to police officers, then the system automatically backfills that data to officers’ cruisers while they’re in the field, rather than waiting for manual updates, he said.
The flow of information is further supported by the platform’s AI-enabled computer-aided dispatch capabilities, which help automate and streamline a dispatcher’s workflow, particularly during peak call times, said Tim Merrigan, chief customer officer at Mark43.
The enhanced public safety platform has also boosted the department’s data analytics to enhance resource allocation and insights on crime trends to inform decision making, Norton said.
“It gives him all the tools necessary to pull data … to better deploy officers on where the needs are, whether it be traffic, crime or accidents,” he said.
Such improvements can help officers address and resolve cases faster because “it makes the data more actionable” and can be “used to forecast future needs” more efficiently, Keenan said.
The benefits of HPD’s modernization extends beyond the single agency, he said. As more public safety agencies across the state turn to enhanced systems like Mark43’s, it can improve the interoperability and collaboration among first responders managing incidents that cross jurisdictional boundaries.
Across Massachusetts, “there are 300 police departments [and] records management systems” that are not compatible with each other, “so it’s a phone call from a detective to an officer and emailing, faxing and [sending] PDFs” to piece together different information about a single case, Keenan said.
With a statewide approach to modernization, HPD can better conduct cross-agency searches among departments.
Ultimately, “access to information faster is really the strength” that innovative and modernized technology brings to public safety, Keenan said.