Outdoor Wireless Network Solution

The City of Everett is piloting a Cisco Systems Metropolitan Mobile Network solution that extends network-based police tools to officers in the field. When fully deployed, city officials expect the solution will have a major impact on officer productivity and public safety, while helping to enable a wide range of future wireless initiatives.

For a midsize community, the City of Everett, Washington, has full-sized law enforcement requirements. To better protect the city's 100,000 permanent residents, the City of Everett Police Department had adopted a wide range of technology initiatives, including extensive intranet and Internet law enforcement tools running on the city's Cisco Systems network. But while the solutions offered many benefits, they also created new challenges.

"It's great to have access to records and be able to network to other parts of the country to look for outstanding warrants or similar unsolved crimes," says Boyd Bryant, police sergeant and public information officer for the City of Everett Police Department, and supervisor of the department's technology projects. "The difficulty is that during that process, officers are out of touch with the community. Their eyes are no longer engaged in what's happening on the street." According to Boyd, the average police officer spends about four hours per 12-hour shift in a police station. "This amounts to 34 percent of our workforce that is persistently out of touch with the community for 34 percent of their workday," He says.

For Sgt. Bryant, the solution to this issue was obvious: make those network-based police tools mobile, and help enable every officer on the beat to be more efficient and do the same work from their car that they would normally do at the station. But the department's existing mobile networking infrastructure was extremely limited. The city had invested in laptop PCs for each squad car, but network connectivity relied on 900 MHz voice radio modem technology.

"The traditional mobile system is text only and operates on a very limited bandwidth," says Sgt. Bryant. "That means a driver's license check could never include things like a quality photograph associated with the computer query results." The department was also concerned that these older technologies would not continue to be technically supported in the future.

The police department needed a new mobile wireless strategy with a networking infrastructure that could support rich applications and services, and keep officers fully connected in the field.

Sgt. Bryant began researching potential solutions in 2001. After exploring a variety of systems and speaking with representatives from other police departments around the country, Sgt. Bryant and the City of Everett IT team chose Cisco Systems and Cisco Gold Certified Partner Northrop Grumman to support the department's new mobile network solution. Having used a Cisco network to support the City of Everett's network and data services for several years, the city's IT department felt that only Cisco offered the performance, long-term investment protection, and especially, reliability that the city required.

"When you're dealing with mission-critical equipment that people's lives can depend upon, you have to choose appliances that you know have a very long track record of being extremely reliable," says Sgt. Bryant. "At one time, I owned an ISP business, and the equipment we worried about least was the Cisco routers. They did not fail us."

The police department has begun a pilot to test the solution, incorporating 10 mobile wireless-equipped squad cars and four network access points across the city. The solution is built on Cisco 3200 Series wireless and mobile routers equipped with 802.11 standard-compliant hardware, Panasonic laptops in the squad cars, and Cisco Aironet® bridges used for wireless coverage areas in the city.

The Cisco 3200 Series Wireless and Mobile Router uses the 802.11 wireless standard to deliver much higher bandwidth than the department's legacy system, and can support rich applications and bandwidth-hungry voice and video communications.

"The flexibility of the Cisco Wireless and Mobile Router solution is the key," says Sgt. Bryant. "There is nothing else on the market that allows you to incorporate a variety of wireless standards and network-based applications with field printers, cameras, presentation tools, and an almost endless variety of other devices in a network on wheels."

"We needed a product that had a proven track record in the wireless market, but also had the flexibility to adapt to new requirements and support new wireless technology as it becomes available," adds Joe Boland, information technology manager for the City of Everett. "The Cisco Wireless and Mobile Router gave us a durable, rugged product that could handle the challenges of being mounted on a patrol vehicle. The people at Cisco Systems have also been very committed to helping us find the best way to deploy the technology to ensure the project is a success."

The Cisco wireless and mobile solution offers secure, rugged wireless connectivity optimized for harsh outdoor environments. The solution was designed to integrate easily with wired Cisco networks, helping to enable streamlined, centralized management of the entire wired and wireless infrastructure.

Once the wireless applications and infrastructure are fully validated, the police department will expand the solution to all cars and implement complete, citywide wireless coverage.

"Both Cisco Systems and our integrator, Northrop Grumman, are being very creative in helping us get our model deployment," says Sgt. Bryant. "We have some very good talent we're working with, and I'm very pleased with the responsiveness of everyone involved. In particular, Joe Boland and his staff have routinely risen above and beyond the call of duty to help ensure that whatever applications and hardware we field are robust, reliable, and very well supported."

The police department plans to use the mobile network system to extend access to mug shots, critical incident checklists, and the department's record management system to officers in the field in real time, enhancing their ability to identify and apprehend suspects. Once officers can stay connected to network-based police tools in the field, the solution could also serve as a force multiplier for the department.

"With mobile network access and tools like voice recognition, some of our preliminary tests indicate we could cut report writing time in half," says Sgt. Bryant. "Since most of those four hours per shift at the police station are spent writing reports, that means we could feasibly add a large number of hours to the officer's time on patrol. That's very important for providing affordable, efficient service to the community."

More than just improving efficiency, however, Sgt. Bryant also believes that the solution will increase the safety of the city and its citizens.

"We'll be able to put our officers back in contact with the public, giving us additional eyes and ears in the community," he explains. "And, with the ability to access driver's license photos, booking photos, outstanding warrants, and the future potential of remote fingerprint scanning services, officers will be much better equipped to identify and apprehend criminals."

The full solution will also help enable the department to update officers in the field on policies and procedures in real time. Police procedures can change frequently as a result of court decisions and policy changes in other areas of government. The ability to instantly communicate changes will help enable officers to make better decisions and reduce the department's liability exposure. "The savings from one good, informed decision from a mobile paperless policy system can be enormous," says Sgt. Bryant.

Sgt. Bryant also envisions a day when the department's mobile command vehicles can serve as core networks in a disaster zone, serving emergency personnel on the scene, transmitting observations back to a command center, or even controlling mobile video cameras in areas where human beings can't go.

Cisco and Northrop Grumman are also working with the police department to enhance its public information abilities by creating what Sgt. Bryant calls "the crime prevention vehicle of the future." The solution consists of a sport utility vehicle equipped with an array of network-enabled presentation tools in a custom enclosure for hosting public events. The vehicle allows an officer to pull into playgrounds, shopping malls, and other public spaces and deliver engaging, high-tech crime prevention presentations. The vehicle's large LCD monitor and mobile networking gear supports videos and safety demonstrations, as well as remote video. Officers can even use the vehicle-mounted printer to create personalized crime prevention brochures for citizens. These services are equipped to use voice recognition software, so officers can easily run the system while working directly with the public. In addition, the vehicle can be used as a mobile communications and command center during an emergency.

In the long term, Sgt. Bryant and the city's IT department imagine that the mobile wireless network infrastructure will serve much more than just the police department. Eventually, they believe it will support a wide range of local government services, including transit, public works, utilities, education, and especially homeland security. Having the core infrastructure in place will also help the city win funding grants for these initiatives.

City officials believed that Cisco was the only partner that could offer a versatile foundation for meeting the needs of the future, while delivering the flexibility and reliability the police department needed in the short-term.

"In public safety and government service, you need to understand three things," says Sgt. Bryant. "First, you are becoming more technology dependent for your efficiency, so your systems must be backed by a corporation you know will be there several years from now. Second, you have to be certain you have the capacity to transition to another service if you need to. Third, you need to be able to support redundant network connections to help ensure that you're not only covered, you're resilient. The Cisco solution is the only one we've found that gives us all of that."

Cisco Systems has already helped state and municipal governments around the world improve public safety and become more efficient. To find out how Cisco can help your government agency, contact your local account representative, or visit: http://www.cisco.com/go/government

This customer story is based on information provided by The City of Everett and describes how that particular government benefits from the deployment of Cisco products. Many factors may have contributed to the results and benefits described; Cisco does not guarantee comparable results elsewhere.