With technology playing a greater role for frontline agencies, it is imperative that these organizations are equipped and connected with the tools they need to keep both themselves and the community safe while maintaining transparency with the public. In a sector that has traditionally been risk-averse and sometimes a late adopter of technology, advancements around cloud services, diverse and reliable communication networks, data and analytics, AI and IoT are all helping to foster innovation. 

The pandemic has created unforeseen challenges for public safety and justice agencies, driving them to prioritize and accelerate digital transformation so their staff can work remotely while staying secure to continue everyday operations. As they embrace these new technologies, departments are also uncovering new capabilities, efficiencies and cost savings. This new way of operating – although born out of necessity – is proving to be an effective way of serving people and communities.

Evolving frontline emergency response

At Microsoft, it is our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, which includes working with agencies worldwide to align technology to the drivers of change in public safety and justice.

Agencies are leveraging Microsoft Azure’s data analytics and cloud technology to enable modern emergency-response and proactive crime reduction systems. Using cloud-based analytics, workers can automate and optimize procedures for increased efficiency and situational awareness to analyze, recognize and appraise risk more effectively. This can help law enforcement officials identify emerging trends, help fire services deploy equipment dynamically and allow emergency medical personnel to be more responsive.

A vast, global ecosystem of partners 

 While all these technologies ensure our frontline is equipped with the tools that they need to create safer communities, we need to also ensure agencies have the connectivity they need – no matter where they are located – to fully take advantage of these toolsets. At Microsoft, we fuel a powerful ecosystem of partners that understand the unique needs of the frontline.

One of these partners is Dejero, a company with over 140 employees based in Waterloo, Ontario that aggregates diverse connectivity paths to deliver enhanced reliability, expanded coverage and greater bandwidth using cloud-based technology. When it comes to public safety, Dejero leverages Microsoft Azure to deliver mission critical connectivity for first responders. When responding to a scenario in harsh or remote environments, there are often connectivity challenges, including network coverage gaps, compromised or damaged cellular infrastructure or network congestion. Dejero Smart Blending Technology addresses these hurdles by blending any and all available network connections – including 3G/4G/5G and satellite – to create a single virtual “network of networks” optimized for speed and reliability.

Another Microsoft partner, Hitachi Solutions worked with the Barrie Police Service in Ontario to develop the Officer Reporting application. Built with Microsoft Power Apps, the solution is designed to replace obsolete tools while enhancing functionality, improving efficiency in operations and supporting agile growth when developing a police report.

Empowering cross agency collaboration 

We’re also empowering the frontline with Microsoft Teams for cross-agency collaboration. With Teams, agencies are reducing the risk of infection for users by sharing data, services and innovation across jurisdictions ultimately enabling frontline workers to operate more efficiently and provide more effective citizen service. When agencies share crime, fire, or other incident data, they collectively build data models that apply to community and geographical risks in turn reducing the cost and effort of large-scale data matching and reactive resource allocation.

This data can also help determine where to increase staffing, develop richer community engagement and pre-position safety equipment. Leveraging Teams has also provided greater mobility with workers able to attend meetings from home or in the field and has digitized paper-based processes – like changing shifts or filing activity reports – so workers can focus on more high-impact tasks. 

With public safety organizations worldwide prioritizing the digital enablement of their teams, it is imperative to build technology support structures that ensure consistent and resilient communications between command and frontline.

For more on how Microsoft is enabling digital transformation on the frontline, download this e-book on the future of public safety and justice: Future of Public Safety and Justice | Microsoft 

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With an ever-increasing caseload and a new demand for enabling virtual proceedings, Canada’s court systems are leveraging innovative digital solutions to unlock new capabilities, boost efficiencies and democratize justice proceedings. This accelerated modernization has transformed the way public safety and justice organizations engage with their communities and ensure the continuity of service. And with the rapid pace of global digital transformation, our court systems cannot afford to slow down. 

The future of court proceedings is virtual, and we are working closely with our partners to create justice solutions that help people make better, data-informed decisions and deliver trusted outcomes that increase safety, accountability and transparency within communities. 

Digitizing case management  

Court systems are burdened by new and long-standing challenges, such as a heavy reliance on rigid and time-consuming paper-based processes and procedures. Digital case management is facilitating faster, more secure access to documents. As a result, it is also empowering courts to enable remote processes, provide dashboards for judges and other officials to track proceedings and perform analytics on all court-related data to generate insights.  

Secure electronic documentation also eliminates the cost, effort, and inefficiency of producing, transporting, and storing paper. And, importantly, reduces accidental or intentional data tampering, which can lead to financial and reputational consequences.  

Streamlining trials 

Beyond enabling continuity of operations during the pandemic, the impact of a virtual courtroom can be felt throughout the entire judicial process as the pace and quality of justice improve. Virtual attendance has solved some longstanding issues associated with in-person court appearances. Police officers, for example, often need to provide testimony, but the time that they put into travelling to and from the courthouse reduces their time spent engaging with citizens and on patrol in communities. Other witnesses have struggled with finding childcare and transportation. 

With trials conducted through Microsoft Teams video conferencing, hearings are not limited to court room availability, and it is easier to obtain witness testimony. In addition, live translation and transcription with Teams and Azure Cognitive Services can improve and expedite transparency and accessibility for those involved.  

Virtual trials also eliminate the cost and security risk associated with transporting detainees to hearings and trials, and prisons can hold virtual visits between inmates and visitors. 

Ensuring fairness and equity 

Judges want to ensure their decisions are fair and based on the foundations of law and prescribed, measured sentencing. Access to data analytics can help judges make fair and just decisions based on the foundations of law. Judges can draw on insights from similar cases to ensure that penalties align with modern ethical expectations, while data from specialty courts can enable more rehabilitative behavior and address problems at their root. 

Leveraging data to inform sentencing can help ensure defendants receive effective and appropriate sentences. Judges can confidently apply the correct penalties, knowing that they are backed by data.

Complete case management solution 

At Microsoft, we are committed to working with our partners, like E Lex Ratio who has worked with courts in Australia, Canada, Europe, and the Middle East, to fuel innovative solutions that empower courts to modernize operations and better serve local communities. Leveraging Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Power Platform, E Lex Ratio Brief is a complete case management app that covers all aspects of the court process: from initiation and e-filing court data to finalization and publication of judgments. As a fully managed service, this end-to-end solution has been designed to maximize of low code, no code solutions once implemented and can be rapidly configured to any jurisdiction’s approach.  

Learn more about the future of court operations and the partners who bring it together to modernize court systems: Public Safety and Justice Solutions | Microsoft Industry 

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Industry leaders and senior government decision makers from across the country will gather virtually at the MISA BC 2021 Fall Conference to collaborate and engage in important discussions around effective and innovative applications of technologies at the municipal level. This event comes at a pivotal time for the public sector; after 18 months of accelerated digital transformation, local governments must now consider how to enable long-term strategies that leverage robust technological solutions.

Increasing Citizen Engagement: Parkland County

Digital transformation across industries means consumers have elevated expectations when dealing with businesses; the same is true for citizens when dealing with local governments for all types of service delivery. For Parkland County, Alberta, modernizing and automating processes not only created tremendous efficiencies, it has enabled the municipality to deliver the highest-quality digital services to its residents.

Serving more than 32,000 people, Parkland is at the forefront of digital transformation with a roadmap that stretches to 2025. In 2019, the city sought a solution that it could apply across its operations to increase efficiency and standardize how it works – and that could grow to support its long-term transformation efforts. To achieve these ambitious goals, Parkland adopted Microsoft’s cloud-based Dynamics 365 and Power Platform. Since the upgrade, the city’s digitization program has accelerated and swiftly modernized its antiquated and paper-based processes, replacing previous systems and improving data analysis.

Beginning with its 3-1-1 service, which provides information for residents, Parkland deployed Dynamics 365 Customer Service to facilitate a single point of contact, with queries routed to the right department for response. Now, most departments within the organization are using CRM to manage citizen contacts, providing a standardized backbone across the business.

Through the Dynamics 365 platform, Parkland is also leveraging the Project Management module to develop processes that both meet departmental information needs while directly linking and aligning at a corporate level. It’s also using the Finance and Human Resources modules to streamline its financial operations and manage its workforce more efficiently.

As part of the journey, the municipality’s plans span mobile and citizen-facing applications. On the mobile side, Parkland has extended CRM to its field workers – by integrating Dynamics 365 Customer Service with its GIS, it automatically pinpoints the job location and allows workers to access and close tickets around jobs from their mobile devices without needing to return to the office.

With a long-term transformation strategy in place, these digital solutions offer Parkland the availability and scalability to maintain continuity during future periods of disruption, meet changing internal needs, and deliver a wider range of citizen-focused services.

Learn more about transforming municipalities

Microsoft will be sponsoring and sharing more stories and use cases like Parkland County’s digital journey at this year’s Municipal Service Delivery Officials conference, promoting excellence in municipal service delivery in Canada. Please join us by registering for the conference here or connect with Microsoft at cdnmunicipalities@microsoft.com to kick off a conversation on your digital transformation journey.

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As municipal leaders across Canada continue to navigate the road to economic recovery, it is critical to consider how investing in sustainable technology and smart infrastructure can enable communities to not just recover from the pandemic but come back stronger than before. According to a recent report from the International Monetary Fund, government policies “should enable a green, digital and inclusive transformation of the economy” prioritizing projects in collaboration with the private sector. Our current situation presents the unique opportunity for municipalities to rethink “business as usual” and discover how leveraging the right cloud and AI solutions will allow them to improve citizen services, support economic growth and successfully manage future disruption.

Smarter, more sustainable technology

At Microsoft, we’re accelerating progress toward a greener future by conducting research, helping our customers build sustainable solutions and advocating for policies that benefit the environment. As part of our ongoing efforts, we recently unveiled our latest industry-specific cloud at Inspire 2021, Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. Whether it is for the private or public sector, Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability’s offerings can discover and connect to real-time data sources, accelerate data integration and reporting, provide accurate carbon accounting, measure performance against goals and enable intelligent insights to ultimately power smarter communities.

However, what makes a community “smart” isn’t technology, according to Jeremy Goldberg, Worldwide Public Sector Director of Critical Infrastructure at Microsoft. It’s the degree to which technology gives residents better lives, thriving businesses and governments that provide great service. At Microsoft, we are uniquely positioned to help organizations and communities transform the way they operate to drive smarter business decisions for the betterment of the world. And it is through this approach that we’ve empowered cities like Bogota, Colombia, and London, United Kingdom, to drive innovation and implement cutting-edge technology for more sustainable urban infrastructures and a better quality of life for citizens. 

Leveraging data to power cities of the future

Part of Bogota’s plan to develop a smarter community is the New Mobility Agreement, an initiative which empowers every citizen to rethink their priorities and mode of transportation to get around the city. After seeing an increase in walking and cycling, Bogota’s municipal leaders implemented new technology that enables citizens to make better use of existing infrastructure with multi-modal options to plan trips. The technology also leverages data analysis for city officials to establish speed limits that make the routes safer for all.

Meanwhile in London, as part of the city’s Green New Deal, the Mayor has set an ambitious goal for 80% of citizen journeys to be by walking, cycling and via public transport by the 2040s. As a result, new technologies play a big role in improving the capacity and efficiency of existing infrastructure. With mobility technologies generating large amounts of data, the municipal government has made the information collected freely available so that citizens can make more informed choices on how to travel and developers can design more useful mobile applications for their customers.  

Municipal planners are also using the data and analytics collected from these technologies to drive better planning and customer services. Shashi Verma, Director of Strategy and Chief Technology Officer of Transport for London, says the most impactful implementation of mobility technology in London was the development and deployment of contactless payment technology. In 2003, London introduced the Oyster card, a proprietary, closed loop system for payments. This was followed by an open loop system, contactless bank cards, first used in 2012. For a relatively low-cost implementation, Verma says it has had a huge impact, completely changing the way the travelling public interacts with the transport system.

Prioritizing sustainability for municipal recovery

Our cities can only thrive in a post-pandemic world by building and upgrading infrastructure that makes urban spaces and citizen services work for everyone. According to Microsoft’s leading voice on this matter, Jeremy Goldberg, failing to invest in environmentally sustainable technologies now is a form of technical debt, and this debt will come due in the years ahead.  

However, sustainability also means implementing technology that governments can effectively manage and operate. The reality is that governments are balancing budget requirements and workforce constraints that make technology challenging to procure and maintain. Jeremy says this places a premium on solutions that are easily extensible and can be maintained and operated more efficiently. It also underscores the need for public and private collaboration, with partners that offer expert resources with extensive experience providing managed services in the cloud.  

Canadian municipalities need reliable data center infrastructure that meets compliance and regulations; however, governments often struggle to maintain their own infrastructure over time due to funding and policy challenges. Microsoft Azure offers solutions that can cut across the needs of many different agencies, compliance challenges, and technologies – it provides a common platform that can be adopted quickly or incrementally as needed without having to reinvent the wheel every time a new project rises to a high priority or receives long awaited funding.  

No matter where you are in your sustainability journey, it’s never too late to start. Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability is empowering public sector organizations to harness the power of cloud-based technology to help build a more sustainable future for Canada. ​ 

For more information, please visit http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/sustainability.  

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Recently, I had the opportunity to join the Public Sector Network for a virtual partner session on Modernizing Forensic Services that featured remarks from Jeff Adam, Ret. Assistant Commissioner, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and Neil Desai, Vice President, Magnet Forensics. They provided insights on the evolving public safety landscape and the need for collaboration across the public and private sectors to solve these substantial challenges.

With experience spanning decades, Adam recognizes that the status quo is no longer sustainable. The sheer volume of digital evidence that’s pertinent to law enforcement and private security concerns has started to feel like a tsunami of information. This, combined with the increasing pressure for timeliness in prosecutions, the increasing demand on limited, highly specialized resources and the additional scrutiny on techniques and Charter compliance, has created a critical need for change.

We are working alongside our partners, like Magnet Forensics, to support the digital transformation that will help empower this change. Based in Waterloo, Ontario, Magnet Forensics is re-imagining digital investigations for the modern era with an integrated approach that maximizes people, processes and technology.

Modernizing and Transforming Forensics

“The first piece of tackling this challenge is distributing the workload. We have a generation of people coming into policing who are digital natives,” said Desai. In the current model, digital forensics labs are being overwhelmed by an increasing number of investigations that contain a digital element. This is leading to backlogs and delays to investigations. As a result, many digital forensics labs limit what types of cases in which they can accept evidence to be reviewed. Desai said there is a need for a paradigm shift that would better leverage technologies like the cloud, automation, AI and mobility to ensure all investigations with digital evidence can be addressed in a timely and effective fashion.

Police agencies can begin setting that change in motion by looking at simple tools that enable front-line officers to make interventions and capture digital evidence in the field.

“This is a challenge we’ve been working on for a number of years with agencies in Canada and around the world,” said Desai. “I’m pleased to say we developed a solution called Magnet SHIELD that enables all officers to capture digital evidence in the field.”

Deployed on any Windows-based tablet or laptop, such as a Microsoft Surface, Magnet SHIELD enables users to collect photo, video and chat evidence from a mobile phone or memory card. Instead of having to seize devices and send them to digital forensics labs, front-line officers can use Magnet SHIELD to allow consenting witnesses and victims to share only the most pertinent content from their devices at the scene of a crime. Magnet SHIELD helps preserve fleeting evidence, build trust with witnesses by allowing them to protect their own privacy and reduce backlogs in digital forensics labs.  Magnet Forensics has made Magnet SHIELD software free to police agencies globally.

Leveraging Automation

Addressing evidence from consenting witnesses and victims on the front-line will not solely address the backlogs digital forensics labs are facing.  The amount of data and the number of devices they handle grows exponentially every year. Instead of spending most of their time using their extensive expertise to help solve complex cases, digital forensic examiners are often inundated with tasks such as processing evidence and transferring it to external hard drives for review. This leaves their hardware sitting idle.

For Desai, an important next step is creating automated processes that leverage hardware 24-7-365 to develop initial reports that investigators can take a topline look at and share with their stakeholders, both internally in their agencies and across the justice sector.  That’s why Magnet Forensics has developed Magnet AUTOMATE.

“In terms of automation, ideally for rudimentary cases we’re seeing every day that involve the same data and device types, we can start churning through those and getting the outputs in the hands of the investigating officers faster,” Desai said. “This frees up digital forensic specialists to work on the toughest technical challenges and help supporting investigators understand nuances in the critical evidence to their cases.”

The right digital tools can help agencies accomplish goals such as uncovering crime trends, improving response times and developing stronger community relationships. Technology can also play a critical role in reconstructing events, which is time consuming and has the potential to miss key information. Highly integrated data systems can significantly reduce this effort and help investigators find evidence buried across different devices and storage media. Using machine learning and AI, digital forensic examiners can then draw on reliable and secure correlations to provide leads and dramatically reduce discovery time for digital evidence.

At Microsoft, we are committed to responsible AI solutions that reflect ethical principles that put people first. By using AI to optimize administrative functions and services, officers are able to focus on what matters most: human-centered decision-making and empathy. In public safety and justice agencies, decision makers should consider not just what AI can do, but what it should do to innovate in a reliable and trusted way. It’s critical to understand the components of a holistic approach to AI that will help these agencies turn meaningful innovation into actionable results for their communities.

Empowering Collaboration

Public safety and justice agencies are beginning to align to an innovative digital approach that ensures sustainability now and in the future. Magnet Forensics’ vision for managing digital evidence fuels collaboration at all levels. It starts with enabling first responders to capture investigative data on-scene, then supporting digital forensic examiners using automation and AI to industrialize evidence processing; and finally, sharing the evidence with non-technical investigators, as well as broader stakeholders in the justice sector, such as Crown prosecutors and defense attorneys.

With Magnet REVIEW, Magnet Forensics is creating a more efficient, secure and collaborative digital evidence review process. Powered by Microsoft Azure, Magnet REVIEW allows digital forensic examiners to share evidence such as images and chat logs with non-technical investigators in an easy-to-use interface through a web browser. Using the platform, non-technical investigators can continue their investigators remotely, quickly access digital evidence with searches by keyword or date and leave notes to help guide digital forensic examiners through the next steps of the investigation. Magnet REVIEW helps police agencies complete data analysis at a quicker pace and take on more cases, build public trust by returning devices at a quicker rate and ensure that digital evidence is safe due to the increased security and auditability that Magnet REVIEW provides when deployed in the cloud.

At Microsoft, we work closely with our network of partners to understand the needs of public safety and justice agencies and help them utilize the power of our innovative technologies to achieve more for the communities and people they serve. With flexible, integrated and trustworthy solutions, we are dedicated to accelerating digital transformation across these organizations — for more information, I encourage you to read our e-book Future of Public Safety and Justice | Microsoft.

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Driving collaboration on the frontline

In today’s climate, it has become critical for law enforcement agencies to be equipped with robust solutions that enhance internal communication and support collaboration with external partners – ones able to accommodate tasks such as shift scheduling and data exchange, both internally and with other police forces. Given the highly sensitive nature of data being shared, tools must also adhere to the strictest security and compliance standards. To keep pace with these rapidly evolving requirements, agencies across Canada are relying on Microsoft Teams for an all-in-one platform that delivers on the diverse needs of law enforcement agencies. Through Teams, agencies are realizing a number of benefits including:

• Enhanced connections and centralized communications. Teams offers a single hub to streamline workflows, manage daily meetings and tasks, and swap shifts. Officers in the field can also access, share, organize and update documents remotely as well as join meetings or send real-time updates in chat.
• Cross-agency collaboration. Teams allows officers across different regions to easily share information in real time with the ability to cooperate and track criminals as they move across jurisdictions. By bringing together disparate data into one common hub, Teams turns data into actionable information.
• The ability to securely share and protect sensitive data. Only the right users have the right level of access to information, by automatically blocking or limiting access if a user does not have the right permissions or their identity is not verified.

In addition to Teams, Microsoft is also empowering law enforcement through cloud, data, AI and productivity solutions allowing them to uncover new capabilities, efficiencies and cost savings. For example, digital case and record management tools have replaced or improved labour-intensive, paper-based processes built on old workflows. Digital transcription and audio/video recording services have also become a standard for many agencies, in turn reducing time spent on manual tasks and enabling officers and their support teams to focus on higher value functions. As you can see, digital transformation is no longer a future objective, but a requirement to enable remote work and improve operations for the evolution of law enforcement.

A global ecosystem of partners and thought leaders

When leveraging Microsoft solutions, law enforcement agencies benefit from more than just technology; they gain access to a vast partner ecosystem providing exclusive resources, programs, tools and connections to foster growth and fuel digital transformation. We currently have over 13,000 partners in Canada and many more around the world equipping organizations in all industries, including those in public safety, with the expertise and technology to thrive.

One of our cutting-edge partners is NICE, a worldwide provider of software solutions using Microsoft Azure to help more than 25,000 organizations globally make smarter, insight-driven decisions, deliver better customer service, combat fraud and safeguard citizens. We also have Caselines, a Thomson Reuters evidence management solution, that provides a secure and integrated platform to help police, prosecutors, lawyers and judges work across their respective judicial functions with confidence and trust. Another leading partner is VeriSaaS, who brings cognitive-enabled and mobile-ready solutions to improve field intelligence and evidence collection to support mission critical information in the field and for court.

In a time when the public sector is being asked to do more with less, Microsoft remains dedicated to equipping frontline agencies with strong, consistent and secure solutions to help them innovate and better serve their community.

We’re more than just a software company
For more information on how Microsoft Teams is fuelling digital transformation in law enforcement, you can download the following e-book.

I also encourage you to register for an on-demand webinar in which Microsoft’s Kirk Arthur, Director, Worldwide Public Safety & Justice and John Manning, Associate Architect, Public Safety & National Security Solutions, will discuss the latest policing industry trends and how agencies can embrace technology to drive their digital transformation.

On April 29, join us for a live webinar as John Manning, Microsoft’s Associate Architect, Public Safety & National Security Solutions, explores how technology is helping enhance public safety, broker community partnerships, and save lives. Register today to reserve your spot for this live, interactive conversation. 

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