00:01Where am I?

00:02A question we ask ourselves hundreds of times, if not more, in our lives, and probably a good...

00:08...number of you asked yourself, "Where am I?" on the way out here to Palm Spring to this hotel...

00:13...if this was your first time coming, or if you couldn't remember the last time you came here...

00:18...particularly as the hotel changed names since the last time.

00:23But, "where am I?" is a question that we answer frequently, and it can be as simple as this:

00:32Third rock from the sun, North America, United States, California, Palm Springs, Convention Center, Oasis Room.

00:42It can be as simple as, I need to get from the Oasis Room to the Mesquite Room.

00:46It can also be much richer and more complex than that.

00:51You can have a lot of different things go on in my former profession in law enforcement...

00:58...but basically we're a geographically oriented business.

01:04Think about what we do.

01:05Everything we deal with, criminals, locations, crime, events of different kinds, evidence...

01:11...everything is centered around geography.

01:13I usually challenge law enforcement audiences to find something that isn't.

01:17But, for years we've been pulling data like pulling teeth, and I want to take you on a very brief...

01:23...history of time and law enforcement information in the next few minutes here.

01:28I'm going to apologize to some of you because you're young and some of these devices you'll have never...

01:33...known of, because I started in law enforcement in the late sixties.

01:39And in the late sixties - I heard some laughs - in the late sixties, this was high tech.

01:46This is a punch teletype where you created a punch card.

01:50And you fed that punch card into the computer and then sent the information to Sacramento...

01:55...and if Sacramento was nice and you got all the punch card, all the punches right...

02:00...and you had it aligned right, they might send your message on to the federal government so you could...

02:04...get that answer that you needed.

02:07And as somebody said today, were there radios when you started?

02:10Yeah, Marconi was dead, and there were radios in the sixties when I started in police work.

02:14But we had in-car radios.

02:17We had a thing called a mimeograph.

02:18If we got a message that we needed to share, we had to retype that message, and then mimeograph it off...

02:25...to give everybody a copy.

02:27Fast-forward to the eighties now.

02:29In the 1980s we had portable radios on our hips now and we had a thing called xerography.

02:36We could actually copy things right there.

02:39But realistically, not a lot going on in computers.

02:43Our records were still hand typed, hand searched, hand filed.

02:49Very little computerized.

02:50Move to the 1990s.

02:52In the 1990s now, we're starting to do some different things.

02:57In the past, by the way, our mapping, the city public works map and the Chamber of Commerce map...

03:03...that was mapping for us.

03:05Now in the 1990s, we got into doing some GIS, mainly for analytics, but we also had advanced tremendously...

03:12...in the mapping side because we had Thomas Guides.

03:16And that was technology for us on the mapping side of mapping calls.

03:21We had a computer-aided dispatch system, albeit rudimentary, and we were moving on.

03:26Today, my former department has mobile devices, smart devices in their cars, a computer-aided dispatch...

03:34...that includes GIS, it has all of the modern accoutrements available, but you know what?

03:40We're still pulling information.

03:43What I want to tell you is with the challenges that are coming up now, with police departments' budgets...

03:48...and government budgets in general becoming tighter...

03:51...I found out last month that there's 10 percent fewer police officers today than existed 18 months ago in this country.

03:58So they gotta work smarter, they got to put people in the right place at the right time for the right reason...

04:04...and to do that we need to start pushing data to them; we need to engage in contextual computing.

04:11And what's the most important context in law enforcement?

04:14It's location.

04:16Sure, the devices are important, and the time is important, and all the other information that goes to it...

04:21...but contextual computing.

04:24The ability for us to understand where an officer has responded and tell them what's around them.

04:33What should they expect that location?

04:35They've been out there three times before, it's been domestic violence calls.

04:39There's a person that lives there on parole or probation.

04:42There's a sex offender lives around the corner, there's a gang that works the neighborhood.

04:46You should know of special events going on in the neighborhood, to be alert to that.

04:50We should have all of the information that deals with that pushed to us...

04:55...and be able to discern that information, use that information to provide for a safer response police department.

05:02The devices exist, the networks exist, the computing speed is there, and we have the data already...

05:09...we just don’t know how to push it.

05:11And you folks have the ability to do that.

05:14We have the ability to create a geographic understanding around all of the data that law enforcement collects.

05:22We have the ability to kind of engage in some transformational work that could help make police officers...

05:28...safer; in the same vein make cities safer, and also give the public more information...

05:35...because one of the basic tenets of community policing is sharing with the public that transparency...

05:42...of sharing with the public because if they understand your problems they'll become engaged...

05:47...and as Chris said, they'll become those citizen sensors that we need out there reporting things...

05:52...and also keeping us apprised of what we're doing right, and what we're doing wrong.

05:57So - I forgot a slide again, or two.

06:02I apologize for that.

06:05But these are the technologies that we've gone through, this is where we are today - we're with smart devices...

06:12...with smart information, and smart people out here in this audience.

06:16And what I'd like you to do is give you a heads up, because we can create that heads-up display of the future.

06:22We can make officers smarter on a mobile device.

06:25It may not be the same thing that Eric might see in his aircraft or his helicopter, but nevertheless...

06:32...a heads-up display on a smart device, and you folks have the ability...

06:37...to do that working with one another as partners.

06:40Thank you.