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Interoperability in public safety and justice information systems—a national priority
Two broad themes emerged in the aftermath of September 11 as broad goals to guide the expenditure of funds in both the Department of Justice appropriations and in the rules defining allowable expenditures of Department of Homeland Security grants to state and local governments. The themes are interoperability and information sharing. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon resulted in the very public revelation of the shortcomings of first responder radio equipment as firefighters and rescue workers were unable to communicate with people from other than their own jurisdiction. The problem was well known and not new to first responder agencies, even if the awareness of the problem had not been as public. Previous disastrous events throughout the country had amply demonstrated this critical gap in the architecture of radio technology.
Before these tragedies, the will to solve the problem as expressed in legislative and executive branch mandates did not seem to be there. Now that funds are being committed to radio system interoperability, companies have developed numerous solutions to enable multi-frequency operations, and frequency translation systems have been procured in significant numbers to avoid the consequences of a failure to communicate among all of the responding agencies at an event. Research and development of software defined radio systems where the parameters of a radio can be controlled totally through software instead of electronic components holds out considerable hope that there is any easy to implement a national solution to voice interoperability. The need for this capability is critical at every major event requiring the response of multiple agencies and jurisdictions whether it is terrorist precipitated or a natural disaster.
Improved information sharing between agencies, particularly when defined as Federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies sharing information with state and local officials, was at least originally limited to low-tech responses such as putting secure fax machines in statehouses and providing secure telephones. As bulletins began to be issued by field offices of Federal law enforcement agencies to appraise their own local contacts about activities, information sharing was elevated to the e-mail level, but sparingly due to security concerns.
While everyone including the general public can endorse the need for people at a tactical scene to talk to each other, and the beginning efforts of Federal agencies to share information with state and local officials are laudatory, there is a very large piece of strategy and appropriate action missing from the attempt to solve the interoperability problem and improve information sharing. The computer systems employed by public safety and criminal justice agencies must also interoperate and must form a foundation of information sharing in support of homeland security.
The reason that we want as a nation to have interoperability and information sharing capabilities is to ensure that first responders and related justice and other agencies can communicate and share information in order to prevent/detect potential acts of terror, to make effective responses to such acts, and to investigate/prosecute the perpetrators. Computer systems are critical to the success of these efforts. Yet we are only in the infancy of information sharing between and among local agencies whose work finds them in the midst of counter-terrorism activities. Among first responders, at the atomic level, there are few police computer aided dispatch systems that can interoperate with other police agencies, and fewer still that allow for the effective exchange of information among all responding agencies (police, fire, EMS at the local, regional, state, and Federal level). So data on the nature of the event, the characteristics of the threat, and extent of damage, etc., are only available in ad hoc incident management scenarios where the exchange is based on personal or voice contact at best.
Much has been written about the inability of police organizations to get intelligence information from various Federal agencies, citing the difficulties raised by security, source protection and other reasons. Although we rely heavily on the preventive capabilities of law enforcement, we cannot at this stage state with any conviction that we give these agencies the information they need to target their efforts on suspected terrorists or events.
Furthermore, the post-incident involvement of courts, prosecutors, investigators and others in processing offenders and otherwise following through with arrest and conviction activities puts a great burden on the local criminal justice systems, and the stakeholders at the local level need information and this information needs to be shared across criminal justice agency boundaries.
Justice information systems must be made to interoperate and communicate with the same level of significance as voice communications. At all levels of government, the timely access of information on potential and actual terrorism participants and events is critical to an effective governmental response to acts of terror.
Federal leadership in the development of standards for computer system interoperability has begun with leadership from OJP, but there are many unresolved problems that are both technical and political impediments to building a national system of information sharing serving all stakeholders. Funding is far less than is required at all levels of government, and the national priorities must include this important need if we are going to make significant progress as a nation to increase our capability to reduce the risk and impact of terrorist acts.
Paul Wormeli
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© Copyright 2005 Paul Wormeli.
Last update: 3/16/2005; 9:25:32 PM.
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