Tag Archives: drones

The Next Technology Horizon for Law Enforcement

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With rising crime rates and staffing challenges, law enforcement agencies are looking at new ways to utilize technology and data to become more efficient in protecting our communities. A recent report from Thomson Reuters found that 48 percent of law enforcement respondents said that staffing was their top issue of concern with two-thirds placing staffing within their top three areas of concern. Technology has been an answer to staffing and effectiveness concerns with tools like body-worn cameras, license-plate readers, and video surveillance being widely implemented in departments of all sizes. But to continue to meet efficiency and effectiveness goals, law enforcement agencies have to start looking beyond these traditional technologies to more cutting edge and IT-based solutions.

Drones

Drones are becoming a powerful tool for law enforcement agencies to extend the eyes and ears of their teams. Increasingly drones are being used as first responders to scan a situation to provide context and information back to responding officers before they get on the scene. This use extends from routine noise complaint calls to domestic disputes to large scale emergencies. In all of these situations, drones are able to get to a location faster than humans and provide exact location and situational awareness for officers to be more precise in their response. Continue reading →

Department Spotlight: Department of Homeland Security

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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may be the newest cabinet-level department, but it is still facing the same modernization challenges felt across government. The agencies pulled under the DHS umbrella in 2002 came with legacy systems. While a good deal of integration and modernization happened while DHS was being formed, systems have to keep evolving to keep up with the ever-changing threat landscape and the technologies used to threaten the homeland.

Cybersecurity, as it relates to the protection of the national infrastructure and government systems, is a huge focus for DHS. In fact, The DHS Secretary recently said that nation-state adversaries "are at the highest levels since the Cold War, largely but not exclusively due to leveraging cyber to conduct espionage and influence operations and disrupt services." As part of their efforts to strengthen their cybersecurity posture, the Department is leading the Continuous Diagnostic Monitoring (CDM) efforts across government to provide capabilities and tools to identify cybersecurity risks on an ongoing basis, prioritize these risks based on potential impacts, and enable cybersecurity personnel to mitigate the most significant problems first.

With a broad mandate to support election security, DHS has been collaborating across the government to ensure the security of machines and records for national elections. New technologies such as Albert sensors, technology designed to detect suspicious IP addresses and malware signatures, will be in place in 90% or more of voting machines used in November. Continue reading →

In the Event of an Emergency: Ensuring Government is Disaster-Ready

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With a rash of recent natural disasters, weird weather patterns, and a few months of Hurricane season to go, we wanted to look at disaster recovery practices - beyond the basics. We all know it is critical to have backups for your backups, but sometimes that's not even enough.

Last year, when the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico were impacted by Hurricanes Irma and Maria, they lost a lot of government data. Although they had backups of their data stored in different locations, all of these locations were on the island. In Puerto Rico, first responders were trying to make a map of shelter locations, hospitals and flood zones. They started with a spreadsheet containing information on 450 shelters and had to correlate that information with other datasets. Once the data was merged, they found they only had complete data for 88 of the 450 shelters. Only half of those 88 shelters could be mapped using Google, leaving the team with an incomplete picture and a lot of manual work to identify and publicize shelter locations. Continue reading →