But that’s a huge challenge for many cities today. Think of some of the recent global terrorist attacks in urban areas, where several gunmen struck at different sites. In those situations, the response from public safety was fragmented, because so many different entities needed to communicate with one another but weren’t used to doing so.

It’s all about collaboration

So what can be done to improve the response to such crises? How can these disparate city agencies team up to get the freshest, most relevant information to incident commanders, so they can make the real-time decisions required to save lives and protect property?

Those were some of the big questions addressed at the Citywise Urban Security and Technology Innovation Roundtable in New York City, which I spoke at, and are still pertinent today. The event, sponsored by Microsoft CityNext partner Genetec, attracted dozens of federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies from the greater New York metropolitan region. We gathered to discuss the policies and best practices needed to ensure a coordinated, unified response to crises, and how modern security and surveillance technologies can lead the way.

The big takeaway from our discussions? It’s all about collaboration. By putting more of their time and resources into multi-jurisdictional and multi-agency collaboration, cities can vastly improve their ability to respond in an efficient, unified way. All the agencies in attendance agreed: you can’t wait until an incident occurs to start collaborating! It has to happen on the front end, and it has to involve frequent discussions at a regular cadence.

Bringing it together with the right technology

The second key part of a better, more unified response strategy, of course, is technology. And like collaboration, it needs to be seamless because of the breadth of technologies most cities employ. New York City is a great example. The city is taking advantage of a huge number of security and surveillance technologies, including CCTV cameras monitoring traffic and crowds, automated license plate readers stationed on overpasses, criminal database systems, body-worn police cameras, and even social media and weather feeds.

Every day, the city’s numerous departments and agencies rely on sensors embedded in all of these systems to capture images and data and relay it to central command centers. But capturing and processing all that data often requires the power and scalability of the cloud. Using cloud services, city entities are able to quickly get updated information to people who need it in a crisis. By getting information as soon as it happens, police and fire departments, for instance, can be on the scene as fast as possible.

Genetec is one organization that’s using the cloud to deliver integrated security and surveillance information to city departments. Genetec launched a Microsoft Azure–based security solution that police, fire, and other departments can use to manage images from video security, access control, and license plate recognition cameras across cities to help cut crime.  The solution is designed to help cities make better, more informed crisis response decisions by visualizing where incidents are happening and where the nearest resources are.

NYPD: fighting crime with smartphones

Cities are also increasingly using mobile technologies to respond faster to emergencies. The New York Police Department (NYPD), for example, recently gave all 35,000 of its officers Windows Phones equipped with a domain awareness system (DAS) mobile app. The app accesses several NYPD databases and shows incoming 911 calls, so officers can see what emergencies are taking place near them and call the witness who placed the call.

Several weeks ago, two NYPD officers used the app to quickly identify and apprehend a shooting suspect. This kind of app demonstrates exactly how city departments want their technology to operate. They don’t want to have to think about how it works—they just want to use it to do their jobs better and respond faster.

But, again, it isn’t just about the technology. Collaboration is an essential part of making sure a unified response works successfully. By working more closely together first and then getting the right technologies in place, cities will be much better prepared to respond to a crisis seamlessly and swiftly.

We are proud to be sharing this technology locally as well – helping Canadian cities maximize security and minimize risk. Microsoft is a proud sponsor of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police Conference. This year’s theme, “Public Safety in a Digital Age: Real Victims – Real Crime” will help support discussions towards the growing significance of technology as an evolving threat to public safety in our communities.

We are so excited to be sharing our Aware and Connect Solution with everyone. Aware is a modern technology platform that empowers agency personnel to work smarter and safer. Aware modernizes law enforcement, enhances transportation and maritime security, supports infrastructure, forces protection and enables federal intelligence. It is game changer.

Check out more on how Microsoft digitally enables public safety and justice organizations. Follow us on Twitter for CACP coverage and feel free to engage with us and ask questions. Looking forward to CACP 2016!

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In today’s world, it’s no longer enough for police officers, firefighters, paramedics, and others who are first to arrive at the scene of an emergency to simply respond to calls for help. To perform their jobs effectively, first-responders need to know where crimes or incidents are likely to occur so they can anticipate problems and focus their efforts. They need to communicate and collaborate in real time as emergencies unfold. And they need to collect and manage large amounts of evidence in support of their cases. It is critical that public safety agencies have the right information at the right time so they can quickly assess situations, respond to incidents with the correct personnel and equipment, and communicate with their constituents.

Microsoft offers a series of “intelligence-led, first-response” solutions designed to help public safety officials mitigate threats and improve the safety of their communities. Combined, these solutions can help first-responders address threats more effectively, while better preparing citizens during times of need. Here are some of the capabilities we offer.

Better data and analytics: Today, criminal data at the local, state, and national levels is typically stored in disparate databases, forcing law enforcement officials to search for information in multiple places. Microsoft offers an end-to-end big data platform that enables officials to gather data of any size, from any source, and turn it into critical insights that lead to better-informed responses. In addition, law enforcement officials can develop predictive models to help them analyze historical patterns to assess where future threats are likely to occur. With this information in hand, first-responders can focus their efforts in high-risk areas and help prevent incidents from occurring.

Improved safety surveillance: Using portable technology such as sensors, video cameras, license plate readers, and gun-shot detectors, public safety officials can monitor high-traffic public areas, correlating all of the data they collect in real time to detect potential threats. This, in turn, enables them to address threats in near real-time.

Enhanced emergency management: As an emergency unfolds, public safety officials can easily collaborate so they can coordinate their responses. They can share documents across agencies, use maps to identify the location of each first-responder, and combine information received from different agencies and citizens. And with tools like Microsoft Surface Hub, public safety officials can share all of this content on an interactive whiteboard, communicating critical information to field personnel and working together to develop and implement effective strategies.

Advanced evidence management: Increasingly, police agencies are collecting large quantities of video evidence from a range of sources including surveillance cameras, body-worn cameras, in-car video, and interviews of suspects and witnesses. To make use of all of this information, they need to be able to store and transfer it in the most secure and cost effective manner possible. They also need advanced tools to help them find specific footage and redact sensitive information before video is released to the public. The Microsoft cloud provides enterprise-class security, while reducing the cost of video storage by as much as 30–50 percent compared with managing it on-premises. It also allows public safety officials to securely transfer data from the crime scene all the way to the courtroom. In addition, Microsoft Azure includes tools that enable investigators to instantly find relevant video information, while automatically redacting faces and other sensitive data.

Using Microsoft’s intelligence-led, first-response solutions, public safety officials can revolutionize their intelligence capabilities. They can make data-driven decisions, detect threats more quickly, and better coordinate their responses and evidence. It all adds up to less crime and safer, more prosperous communities.

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Before coming to Microsoft, I worked for law enforcement at both the local and federal levels. I started my career as a municipal police officer in the state of Washington, and eventually joined the U.S. Secret Service, where I worked for 15 years. Initially, I served as a special agent focusing on bank, credit card, and identification fraud. I went on to work as a lead advance agent coordinating and implementing security plans surrounding presidential visits. Eventually, I oversaw the Electronic Crimes Task Force for both the Seattle and San Francisco field offices, leading teams of investigators solving complex financial crimes that involved the compromise of servers and networks by suspects residing outside of the United States.

My experience working in law enforcement has taught me that regardless of location, many public safety and justice organizations around the globe share a common challenge: they work with information stored in disparate data systems, making it difficult to obtain the information they need, when they need it. My work also has taught me that technology can be a powerful tool that transforms the way law enforcement, emergency management, and judicial organizations approach their work. In a nutshell, technology can help public safety and justice organizations operate far more efficiently and effectively than most do today.

Take the Tampa Police Department, for example. The police department has equipped its front-line police officers with real-time crime data that enables them to accurately pinpoint crimes, patterns, and incidents as they patrol the city’s streets. In one case, a Tampa police officer searched data from a terminal in his police vehicle to arrest a sex offender suspect just hours after the victim called police to report the incident. Searching a cloud-based database that consolidates criminal information in a single location, the officer overlaid the sex offender registry map on the local area, found a photo that matched the victim’s description, located the suspect, and arrested him the same day they received the report.

As the person who oversees Microsoft’s “mobile first, cloud first” strategy for public safety and justice communities around the world, I want to expand innovative technology such as this to other organizations. Already, many public safety agencies are starting to adopt cloud-based technology such as Office 365. And as they realize that Microsoft’s Azure cloud provides more security than most public safety organizations can obtain on their own, I predict more public safety and justice organizations will turn to the cloud to securely store and manage their data, giving those who need it the real-time access they require.

Not only will this help jurisdictions communicate and collaborate when responding to large-scale events, but it will help front-line workers tackle the everyday crime, fires, and other emergencies that plague our communities. Ultimately, it will provide public safety organizations with the data they need to prevent crime and other emergencies before they occur. By working at Microsoft, these are the goals I’m working with public safety and justice organizations to achieve.

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