Public Safety Applications - Back to the Basics
What is Public Safety? Sometimes it is a good idea to step back and look at reminding ourselves what we are doing in our waking hours and why!
Folks, public safety is the second leg of basic needs of everyday life for us – first is the Physiological needs (Food; air, water, cloths, Shelter; health) and the second leg is safety/security. Yes, it is an essential need for having a normal everyday life. Say doing anything, like being able to walk out of the house and get a cup of coffee at the coffee shop, with peace of mind and of course for the coffee shop business to open early in the morning get things going with peace of mind.
We spend close to a trillion dollars to pay for the public safety law enforcement and Judicial System. Another trillion dollars for the fire fighting in US. These are approximate budgets including local and federal spending.
Did we establish the importance and the significant economics of the Public Safety sector?
Then why do we have such a fragmented, outdated, unreliable, limited functionality and performance Public Safety software applications?
One actual example is the project for implementing simple business process improvement for the inmate processing at a detention facility. The task requires that the inmate identity be verified at the beginning, so we establish record data integrity through the booking process. The typical city level detention center booking process is quite a complicated one, involving multiple actors (patrol or arresting officer, correction officer, multiple departments within the detention center like the data processing personnel, medical, classification, and housing, the courts, the district attorney, the police records office, the interfaces to other local apps and to County level justice systems, and the State and Federal level.
Well, the largest and number one supplier of public safety biometric identification applications has failed miserably to deliver this simple functionality! Yes, they delivered a product, but a truly painful to use solution, barely working and for sure not meeting any of the basic requirements – like officer safety, reliability, speed, usability – even the fingerprint sensor they use in their product is conditionally working device!
Conclusion: There is a dire need for substantial improvement and new business models for developing and deploying public safety applications.
The objective of this series of articles on public safety applications and the market space is to document and share the experiences and lessons learned from actual projects in the field. Please forward any questions or requests for more information and any suggestion for improving the presentation and content to ben.bavarian@abisandbiometrics.com.