Location, location, location

I think that’s an old saw from the real estate business, but it also applies to the public safety enterprise.  Geography is incredibly important to police officers and firefighters.  Understanding where your resources are is important for a supervisor and a dispatcher.  It’s also important for a police officer or firefighter to have a general sense of where his or her colleagues are. It’s about both resource utilization and employee safety.  In an emergency, we’d all like to find the officer or firefighter who needs help.

During my career, keeping track of who’s where has always been accomplished via the radio.  You tell the dispatcher where you are at when called, you let the dispatcher know when you’ve arrived at the scene, and so forth.  You keep an ear tuned to your beat buddies’ radio traffic, so you’ve got a general idea where they are and what they’re doing. 

This is all about to change, with automated vehicle location, and with the embedded location services in a growing variety of mobile devices.  Such systems are not new, but in the past few years the technology has become much more approachable.  Today, I can whip up a sorta-kinda-AVL system with free apps on a group of smartphones.  In fact, I do just that with my family. 

Although some police and fire departments have used this technology for years, we are just beginning to experiment with it here in Lincoln. Last week, we lit up GPS receivers in a handful of our Lincoln Fire & Rescue vehicles.  When three of these units all responded to this incident yesterday afternoon, a snapped the screen shot below:

Awards bestowed

Lincoln Fire & Rescue's annual awards and recognition event was held last night, and I was honored to be in attendance.  In addition to honoring fire employees, the Emergency Communications Center also recognized dispatchers, and citizens were honored as well for their life-saving efforts.

The Phoenix Awards go to citizens, dispatchers, and firefighters whose role in handling a medical emergency contributed to a life-saving response.  There were several dozen of these awards bestowed.  The length of award winners is considerable, but I particularly want to mention the Firefighter of the Year Award, which went to Mike Hohbein, and also Kelly Davila, recognized as Dispatcher of the Year.

It was a very nice event, which began with a dinner prepared by firefighters.  By the way, everything you've heard about firefighters' cooking?  It's all true.  Congratulations to all the award recipients on a job well done!

Location-aware bulletins

Lincoln’s ground-breaking LBS application for police, P3i, has gone commercial.  The University of Nebraska’s research commercialization program, NUtech Venutures, has helped the UNL developers form a marketing arrangement with the Omega Group, makers of CrimeView, a popular suite of GIS and crime analysis software products for law enforcement.  The Omega Group has rebranded P3i as CrimeView NEARme.

Prior to this roll out, developers Ian Cottingham and Kevin Farrell added a few new features, one of which I am particularly intrigued with: location-aware crime bulletins.  Among the products the Lincoln Police Department’s Crime Analysis Unit produces are printed crime bulletins. These are usually one or two page documents meant to inform officers of an emerging crime trend, a series of related cases, a new criminal enterprise, a specific suspect, and so forth.

Lincoln is not unique in this regard.  This is a bread-and-butter product of crime analysts all around the country, and documents of this type are thumb-tacked on police bulletin boards world wide. More recently, many departments have begun distributing such bulletins as .pdfs on their Intranet.

While crime bulletins come in a variety of flavors, many relate to a specific geographic area.  Our Crime Analysis Unit Manager, Andrew Dasher, observed one day that a location-based services app like P3i would be a great way to deliver such content to officers in the field: as you entered the area where the bulletin information was relevant, a link would appear on the map, and a click would open the bulletin alongside the map. The developers ran with that idea, and here’s what the result looks like, on the Windows version of CrimeView NEARme:

Gruntled again

Yesterday's little dust-up concerning belly dancers seemed to be well in hand. I felt it was just a minor error by the reporter, who probably misread the copious notes he had collected surrounding the series of articles he has been writing about human trafficking. The manner in which the Daily Nebraskan had responded to it, however, fired me up, and I was like a dog with a bone to chew.

This occurred yesterday when it came to my attention that the DN had corrected the (non) quote in its online edition, and had also run a correction in the print edition.  I happened to see the print edition, and my formerly red hair (red former hair?) began to flame. This was no correction at all.  Rather, it was an apology by the DN for printing my (non) quote!  Instead of simply stating that Casady had been misquoted, the DN actually did the reverse: confirmed that they had quoted me, and apologized for printing what I (had not) said:

"In a quote in a March 6 Daily Nebraskan article, Lincoln public safety officer Tom Casady listed 'belly dancer' among a list of sex related businesses escort services may be fronts for. The Daily Nebraskan did not  intend to associate belly dancing with sexual transactions by running the quote and apologizes for any confusion. Belly dancing is a form of middle eastern dance taught and practiced throughout the world. the Daily Nebraskan regrets this error."

I never asked for a correction in the first place, but this was worse. The editors of the Daily Nebraskan chould have just called me or sent me an email to say, "Sorry we misquoted you, and really sorry our attempt to correct matters actually compounded the error."

It took quite an effort on my part to get this to happen, but I finally received an email reply from the managing editor and a return phone call from the editor-in-chief at the end of the day.  The appropriate apology was politely delivered, and this was published in this morning's print edition:

"A story on human trafficking, which ran in the Daily Nebraskan on march 6, misquoted Lincoln Public Safety Director Tom Casady. In the story, he is quoted including “belly dancers” in a list of sex-related businesses that escort services may be fronts for during his testimony to the state Legislature’s Judiciary Committee. According to the committee hearing transcript, the phrase in the quote should instead be “lap dances.” Belly dancing is a form of Middle Eastern dance taught and practiced around the world. The Daily Nebraskan regrets the error."

That's more like it. Consider me gruntled. Among the flood of emails I received from belly dancers was this one last night, from someone who is mad that I am not sufficiently mad about a student journalist's one word error. The subject line was "Still annoyed...":

"Dear Mr. Casady,

I am going to keep this brief, but in the scheme of things the misquote was a big deal, a very big deal.  If you know anything about the history of Raqs Sharqi/Belly dance in the U.S, then you will understand the reason so many dancers were 'peeved'. The dance was seen as lewd, disgusting, and sexual on its arrival and not much has changed I see; it was call the hootchy coochy dance at one point.  Still today, there are social stigmas that women who want to partake in this art face from their families, friends, and colleagues right here in the USA, not to mention what the dancers endure in Egypt and other parts of the Middle East.  Scholar Andrea Deacon wrote, ' western society takes various distancing positions toward belly dance: ignoring, joking about , diminishing'. And that what you did, diminished the mistake as trivial as if we were all the same or unimportant. So it is still quite offensive that you took the misquote so lightly until it involved you."

Belly dancers peeved

Never thought I'd be penning a blog post title like that.  What an interesting evening.  I took off a little early yesterday, and loaded four of the five grandkids up for a little excursion to grandma and grandpa's house.  While playing with the munchkins, my iPhone was beeping incessantly. Around 5:00 PM, I started receiving a string of emails from...annoyed belly dancers? They are still coming in this morning.

Apparently the source of the annoyance is this article in the University of Nebraska student newspaper, the Daily Nebraskan.  The comments on the DN's website went nuts, and the tech-savvy had no trouble finding my email address.  Last December, I testified before a Nebraska legislative committee hearing on the topic of human trafficking.  I am quoted in the article saying that escort services are "fronts for erotic dancers, belly dancers, erotic massages and prostitution."  Methinks the reporter mistook his notes, and replaced something like "lap dancers" with "belly dancers," because I don't believe I said such a thing. If I did, it was an incredible gaffe, because I certainly realize belly dancing is not associated with the sex trade in any way.

I have patiently replied to each email, explaining that this must be a misquote.  Here's an example, my response to a belly dancer from Texas, who delivered quite a lecture to me:

This is a misquote, I believe. Perhaps the student reporter misread notes concerning my testimony that escort services are a front for activities like erotic massage, lap dancing, exotic dancing and prostitution.  I would never, ever put belly dancing in such a list, which would be akin to including something like figure skating or gymnastics.  You can take belly dancing lessons at the Y, for goodness sake! Legislative committee hearings are streamed live, recorded, covered by the Nebraska press, and I normally submit written testimony.  I have testified at two legislative hearings in the past few months concerning the sex trade and the issue of human trafficking. Both were widely covered in the news, as a Google search will reveal, and no one has quoted me as associating belly dancing with the sex trade prior to this article in the University of Nebraska's student newspaper.  Had I actually said something like this, I believe it would have raised some eyebrows among the senators and the gallery, and I am pretty sure it would have been picked up by the rest of the media. The reporter may have made a mistake in either his note taking or writing. 

Tom

Hopefully Apple's big event today will eclipse this story, and my inbox will settle down.

It is a good series of articles, despite this slight dust-up.  The Daily Nebraskan's coverage of the issue of human trafficking over the past year has been excellent.

Source of success

I've been contacted in the past week by The Spokane Police Department, the Lexington Police Department, the St.Louis Metropolitan Police Department and the New Jersey State Police. These agencies are seeking information about our police information systems. Three of the four were particularly interested in our use of CrimeView Dashboard, a GIS-centric analysis and visualization product from the Omega Group.

While the software these agencies inquired about is great, it is the quality and quantity of data behind it that allows us to be so successful with CrimeView and our other information resources. That is a product of thirty years of development by our own IT staff, especially Mr. Clair Lindquist, who has put Lincoln in the position so envied by other cities.

Hot seat

I spent a half-shift yesterday in the hot seat, dispatching at the Communications Center. Megan plugged me into the west end law enforcement console, and off we went.  I did the talking, she did the typing for the first hour or so.  Then I tried to take over the keyboard of the computer-aided dispatch system, and struggled along as best I could for the next few hours.

It was a little rugged, but my trainer rescued me when I got lost.  Back in the Pre-Cambrian era, I would occasionally dispatch for a few hours, but it all changed with the mid-1990's transition to computers from cards.  There is a significant learning curve, the surface of which I have barely scratched.  Nonetheless, it was fun and informative, and reinforced a few things that I knew and tried to practice back in the mists of time:

1. If you must listen to your music or the ball game, at least turn the thing off before talking on the radio.  Its much more distracting on the far end, because all the noise is relatively flat coming through the headset with no directional differentiation, unlike your car.
2. Have I mentioned that it should be a misdemeanor to give a street a name composed of more than one word, and a felony if the name contains more than 12 characters? A little help is appreciated.  For example, if you're calling a traffic stop at Antelope Valley Parkway and Salt Creek Roadway on a blue Ford Taurus with license plate OXR025, you can say it far faster than I can type it. Similarly, when one officer's transmission ends, it would be nice to have a nanosecond to gather my wits and prepare for the next, before the entire shift tries to call off duty at the same instant.  There is a huge amount of multi-tasking going on at a dispatch position. 
3. Enunciate.  Pick the microphone up, place it a couple inches from the lips, and remove the four golf balls from your mouth before speaking. 
4. Be nice to your dispatcher.  He or she has your back in many ways.

Rare event

As if February 29th isn't a rare enough event, February 28th didn't want to be left out, so we were treated to a spring thunderstorm last night. Tonja and I sat in the darkened front room and watched the show. It even smelled like a spring thunderstorm. Neither of us could remember such a thing in February in Nebraska.

Another rare event occurred yesterday morning, when the command staffs of both the Lincoln Police Department and Lincoln Fire & Rescue met together. For a couple of hours, the group strategized about how we can do a better job of ensuring that we work well together at the scenes of incidents that both organizations are involved in, such as injury crash scenes, working fires, certain medical emergencies and violent crimes.

LF&R Battalion Chief Leo Benes and LPD Captain Jim Davidsaver facilitated. I had appointed them as a committee of two a couple months ago to undertake this task. It was a productive meeting, and we left with a plan consisting of specific action steps for better cross training, enhanced radio communication, incident debriefings, and functional exercising. I took a photo of the dry erase board where the action steps and assignments were listed with my phone, and emailed that photo to the police and fire chiefs. Sort of a low-tech version of these gizmos.

More than anything, though, I think we all came away from this meeting committed to making a concerted effort to ensure that the police and fire incident commanders at the scene of events are establishing unified command, and engaging in face-to-face communication whenever feasible.

Since I was appointed public safety director last summer, Chief Peschong, Chief Huff, Communications Coordinator Julie Righter and I have been meeting together every Friday morning to discuss our mutual issues and to effect coordination. All of us have been on the job since the mid 1970's, and none of us ever recall the police and fire command staffs meeting jointly. It was about as rare as a February thunderstorm in Lincoln.