Perched along a spectacular strip of Peruvian coastline, Miraflores is a bustling community of seaside shops, nightclubs, and restaurants. Until recently, this upscale corner of Lima was burdened by two unfortunate situations: an influx of crime and no reliable way to report it to the national police.

To solve the problem, Miraflores went online. It installed a hosted software system that enables residents to use their telephones and keyboards to report crimes and other emergencies. With the new system, municipal officials can track response, monitor results, and make more informed police deployment decisions. The system also integrates with a national emergency phone service during major emergencies. As a result, officials and citizens are enjoying a safer community—a 2006 study found a 68 percent drop in robberies since Miraflores implemented the system.

Government officials everywhere face a similar mandate to get services online quickly and securely. But for public safety and disaster relief administrators, the stakes are higher. To protect and save lives, solutions have to be interoperable, mobile, and collaborative—and they have to work flawlessly. A new generation of coordinated, integrated solutions is replacing inefficient stovepipe systems and creating greater public safety and relief response.

"This is a pivotal year for public safety communications," says Tom Tolman, a public safety communications technology leader and president of Ralston Creek Consulting in Denver, Colorado. "What's new and different is that the commercial sector is finding its way into state and local communications services," and the two industries are looking for new ways to work together.

Tolman cites several critical events that have set 2007 apart from previous years' safety efforts. They include the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's upcoming decision regarding radio frequency spectrum allocations and hefty congressional funding for new equipment expected to improve state and local agencies' interoperability.

The key issue never changes, says Tolman, who has studied wireless communications and public safety interoperability for 25 years. "Public safety is adamant about reliability."

The challenge for public safety is not unlike that facing businesses today. Both groups need broadband, IP-based systems capable of handling voice, data, image, video, and multimedia content in a coordinated way. While the patchwork of standalone legacy systems was installed long before today's seamless wireless capabilities could be imagined, new research from the University of Colorado's Silicon Flatirons Telecommunications Program advocates encouraging public safety agencies to adopt a broad view of communications technology as a converged ecosystem.

"By conceiving of public safety as an enterprise that addresses big and small crises, we can equip public safety agencies with cutting-edge tools to protect the public," wrote Philip Weiser and Dale Hatfield of the University of Colorado's law school, both experts in the area of public safety technology.

Indeed, the distributed nature of public safety and disaster relief makes it a challenge to plan and coordinate services and swap information. Emergency-response communities are often large and sprawling, but still operate within structured hierarchies and command-and-control management.

The elaborate, intense rescue and relief efforts for the 2004 tsunami and Hurricane Katrina underscored an important gap within emergency response. First responders and aid organizations were processing screenfuls of fast-changing data on the status of equipment, supplies, and medicine, but they lacked a common ecosystem for sharing it. The wide range of people involved—from local, county, state, and national agencies to military forces and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as the American Red Cross—had no unified communications.

Leaders of the international-based tsunami relief efforts found "they had to coordinate with all of these organizations, none of which had interoperable capabilities," says Tim Bloechl, executive director of worldwide public safety and national security for Microsoft.

In addition to communicating among disparate systems, public safety and disaster relief people need technology that enables selective sharing. "The security of the information is an issue," says Bloechl, a 20-year U.S. Army veteran. Privacy is of primary importance in rescue and relief efforts that often include lists of casualties and details on the notification of next of kin. "Privacy is very important, yet information needs to get out ASAP so people can take action," says Bloechl.

Improvements in long-term disaster response capabilities are already being realized, especially in the area of unified communications. For example, juggling the deluge of real-time data feeds from multiple locations has frequently slowed the work of relief coordinators. At a six-day disaster drill in 2006, a diverse group drawn from the armed forces, NGOs, and technology companies leapfrogged that bottleneck. The volunteers successfully swapped digital satellite images that overlaid event data sent from emergency workers.

The new software capability relies on an open-source protocol developed by Microsoft called Simple Sharing Extensions. SSE technology enables two-way data feeds. In the disaster drill, it was used to share information among various geographic information systems, including Microsoft Virtual Earth.

Real-life victims are also finding comfort in advances in aid technology. When tornadoes cut a 40-mile swath through Florida in February 2007, the American Red Cross helped families and friends reconnect with survivors through its "Safe and Well" Web site. First created as a missing-and-found list during Hurricane Katrina, it is now a permanent service of the Red Cross, which operates in partnership with the San Diego Supercomputer Center, Microsoft, and others.

Delivering further on the promise of interoperability are solutions like Wisconsin's emergency management portal. Created by Microsoft partner Convergence Communications, a St. Louis, Missouri, maker of collaborative software for first responders, the portal acts like a statewide emergency clearinghouse. The state's 72 counties and 1,850 local jurisdictions can use it to store and access plans, track and request resources, and issue alerts and alarms.

In Peru, Miraflores continues to expand the transparency and accountability that's at the heart of its public-safety system. The Lima suburb is adopting more powerful analytical tools and making better predictive use of its current and historical data, according to research presented at a February, 2007, conference on developing nations. It's also adding modules from the system's developer, Voxiva of Washington, D.C., to process complaints and inquiries from citizens on local issues beyond crime reporting.

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