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Police put unique demands on wireless network

01.02.2007
Like everything else, modern police work is increasingly data intensive and network dependent. But when you are supporting 450 police cruisers spread over a county of 876 square miles (including 214 square miles of water), and "mobile" sometimes means delivering vital data to a vehicle in hot pursuit at more than 100 mph, and lost data could mean the difference between life and death in extreme situations, "rigorous" gains extra emphasis in terms of network performance.

That is exactly the environment in which Mac Magruder, deputy sheriff and MIS director for the Escambia County (Fla.) sheriff's office, works. Escambia County includes Pensacola and has a population of approximately 315,000. The sheriff's office has 1,100 employees and is the police force, runs the county jail and also handles more routine tasks such as process serving and prisoner transport.

Data services are vital to modern police operations. When a deputy sheriff pulls over a speeder, he already has basic information on the car -- its description, the owner's name and other information, insurance information, whether it has been reported stolen -- on the data screen in his cruiser. As soon as he has the driver's license, he can get information on the driver, including any police record. "Many crimes are solved and things detected at vehicle stops," Magruder says. "You can never be sure who is in the car, or what might happen." Officers have found themselves in unexpectedly dangerous confrontations at vehicle stops, so this information can be vital.

Similarly, when an incident is reported to 911, the cruisers get data showing what kind of call it is, location and other relevant information often before the dispatcher assigns the call to a unit. "We still use radio dispatch because we need to maintain the radio log as a record," Magruder says. But if an officer is close to the scene, he may respond before the dispatcher can make the call."

Obviously, downtime is unacceptable in this environment, and operations are 24x7x365. Given the particular demands a large police department puts on its data network, here are two lessons Magruder has learned:

1. Choose flexibility: "When I joined the sheriff's office, they didn't have firewalls. Internet activity was much lower then, and it wasn't a concern. Sheriff McNesby directed me to bring us into the 21st century." One of the first things he did was install two appliances running Check Point 3.x from Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. "Then my ISP, Cox Cable, decided to switch from Worldnet to UUnet." That required him to change his IP addresses. "Changing IP addresses in a CheckPont firewall is a major task. It took me a whole day the first time." He was able to do all the re-licensing for the firewalls online, however, and everything seemed under control.