2. Homeland Security funds - Laserfiche WebLink

tion used a different frequency than the fire and medic units on the scene. The fire fighters had to resort to charades to inform medical personnel. "We were doing hand signals back and forth to let them know there was a shooting and medical help was needed," Bruegman says. "That sounds fairly far-fetched, but it happens every day. You drive five miles and fire departments can't talk to fire departments, police can't talk to police." It's a frustrating reality that hinders emergency work and that's just for routine events. Bruegman is looking to the Depart- ment of Homeland Security to articulate a national plan on what local responders need to do and how they should do it. If there is no such plan, departments likely will continue to replace what they have with new equipment that still will not be able to communicate with others. If there were a plan with standards, departments could move in a direction that gets them on the same wavelength eventually. "The worst thing we can do from a local and national perspective," he says, "is spend billions of dollars and find that the equip- ment and response is not interopemble." Interoperability imposes an enormous task. There are many different issues to address. For instance, on the communi- cations front, there isn't enough radio spectrum available for all public safety agencies to be on the same frequency, a situation that hampers interoperability. But it's very a complex issue that requires congressional and Federal Communica- tions Commission decisions on who is using what spectrum. A resolution might require an overhaul of the system that would include private users swapping spectrum with public users, a complicated and expensive proposition. And that's just one issue on the table. Still, instead of getting "analysis paraly- sis,'' local agencies should be taking steps now to get prepared for the unknown, Bruegman says. That includes making sure there are local plans for all "target" areas, such as schools; that all responding per- sonnel are fully trained; that local police and FBI departments sit down and share information; that plans are in place on how to collectively command a situation when different units respond to an inci- dent. If radios don't communicate, people still can figure out a system using pagers or cell phones or whatever else is available. "It doesn't cost a lot of money," he says. "It's an attitude change. We have to com- mit to working collectively with other agencies, whether local, state or federal." George Ake, who works on a regional wireless interoperability project in the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia metro area, sup- ports that notion. Where Suzanne Peck carries around a belt hung with devices, Ake takes a more metaphorical approach. He shows a slide of three little girls playing in a sandbox. He tells audiences where he speaks that government agencies will ben- efit from sharing their ideas and their toys. "Most of the time people don't play well together," he says. Chicago area law enforcement agencies have gotten much better at playing together. More than 130 state, local and federal law enforcement agencies in the area have taken it upon themselves to share the job of collecting, analyzing and dissemi. nating information to one another to thwart criminals and terrorists. They're all tied into the same database for this enter- prise project. "We're collecting a lot of information we historically collected on paper, so we can analyze it in real time," says Ron Huberman, assistant deputy superin- tendent of the Chicago Police Department. Work on the interoperable system started at least a year before September 11, 2001. The Chicago police department developed the system, and some agencies that had no system of their own adopted it. Other agencies are sharing information by maintaining two systems, and still oth- ers are migrating over to the enterprise system from their own. With all those departments working side by side, the sys- tem has become a management tool that can determine crime trends and look at strategies criminals deployed. Depart- 28 G O V E R N I N G May 2003 Governing.com