The 5G Future of 1st Response Communications

Edward McGovern, CEO of Skillset, LLC

February 24th, 2020

As the Founder of Skillset, LLC, I am committed to solving critical event response problems through technology. Our team recognizes our challenges in the 1st Responder space from experience in tactical law enforcement responses, and we understand that bold, lateral thinking is needed to produce success.

After responding to both the Fort Lauderdale airport shooting in 2017 and the Marjory Stoneman Douglas attack in 2018, I became determined to resolve our serious communications deficiencies. Almost every critical event and mass casualty incident since 9/11 has a common detrimental occurrence recounted in the After-Action Reports: Communications Failure. In the first 30 minutes of the Fort Lauderdale Airport scene, officers were trying to manage lockdown of a 1,300-acre facility, 15,000 civilians, and over 400 officers using nothing more than a dry-erase marker and the side of a truck. At MSD, problems with radio patches and bandwidths limitations wreaked havoc on our information relay. Critical Event Response Applications (CERA) was created as a response to all the issues, starting with Targeted School Violence and advancing through Command Operations.

Our goal for CERA is to utilize technology to shrink the communication gaps within 1st Responders. It begins with school shootings and addressing the need to be able to quickly obtain information from teachers to relay to 1st Responders. 

While so many others look for solutions that end with teachers, we are law enforcement-centric. We believe this issue should not be the burden for teachers to solve. Teachers are here to educate our children. This issue needs to be tackled in the 1st Responder venue. If we give teachers phenomenal new tools like panic alarms, yet we continue to respond with our same deficiencies, Law Enforcement will still fail.

Our vision so different because we share one core value, one that should be embraced by everyone developing 1st Response Technology: We have a moral obligation to save lives. If our product fails during a Targeted School Violence attack, we fail. That is why we are developing a way to bridge all the communications gaps and reduce time, whether its minutes or seconds, because time is our enemy in a critical event. We can empower teachers and educators by providing them with tools to change the outcome of the event. But we, in law enforcement especially, must do our part to improve our response capabilities.

My belief is that with 5G capabilities, from its ultra-wide band and low-latency that can transmit communications in milliseconds, 1st Responder communications has endless possibilities. There will be pushback, as with all big changes in the public safety sector. But it is imperative for all of us to embrace change.

The new generation of 1st Responders are veritable experts in mobile technology and applications, so much so that the tech model has reversed. Phones are no longer imitating computers; computers are imitating phones. Computer “programs” have now shifted to “apps” and communications have transformed almost completely to a visual topography. Text messaging, which is visually oriented communication, is preferred by almost 70% of individuals under 40 as the primary way to interconnect. In Law Enforcement, one of our biggest challenges with new police recruits is not archaic issues of report writing or legal knowledge. It is how to understand getting from Point A to Point B. When we step out of our car, respond to a call, or engage in a pursuit, officers must always be aware of and advising our location. In the past, this was always accomplished through memory and experience. Compass directions, landmarks, street names were all our base. But our younger generations have no experience with this. Make no mistake, they are not unintelligent. In fact, they are far ahead of us with many facets of intellect. But their brains have been mapped differently because of technological advances. Their entire lives, their location, direction and the best route from Point A to Point B is decided in an instant by Google Maps or Waze. Then, they enter the 1st Responder world, and we are trying in vain to train them backwards to our old ways, instead of moving forward to embrace their strengths.

Imagine 25-year-old recruits who are now becoming police officers. By age 15, they are taught mobile technology and applications to masterful proficiency. The private sector is driving this technological self-education, whether through social media, shopping, researching, or seeing who is ringing their doorbell. Everything they do now is based on this technology, and these generations are all becoming default experts in it. Then they reach us, and we hand them a giant chunk of metal and plastic, the size and weight of a brick, with a huge antenna, knobs and dials on it. The only visual display looks like an old calculator LCD screen, and we tell them, “This is how you communicate now. You can only talk one at a time. And if you drive further than 10 miles out of your area, it may not work.”

The newest Police Radio issued this year, the Motorola P25, is the first of its kind. Its costs about $4,000 per unit, and it boasts these two advancements: Bluetooth and GPS. This is the 11th anniversary that we can watch Uber pull up to our location with pinpoint accuracy, and finally dispatchers will be able to visually locate officers on a map. Before this, if an officer was injured or not able to transmit their location by radio, police would have to send out helicopters and search parties. Search parties and dry erase markers, those have been our tools my entire career.

With hyper-expansion of mobile technology, I believe Wireless Telecommunications Providers will have the capability to provide complete Public Safety communications with better coverage within the next 3-5 years. Much of their infrastructure is already in place. Their devices provide a platform of endless features, a visual landscape, and more reliability at fraction of the cost. Further, the technology will consistently improve, and standards will remain high, because it is equally driven by the private sector. In order to truly make change, there is no other solution.