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February 26, 2021

The LAPD communicates faster in the field with Microsoft Teams

Faced with the new reality of social distancing and limited personal contact, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) needed a solution to allow the organization to continue to operate and share information vital to its mission of protecting the people of Los Angeles amid the COVID-19 health crisis. Beyond providing the meeting solution they needed, Microsoft Teams now enables officers to share almost real-time crime information, often just minutes after taking a report. From officers in the field to the watch commanders who oversee patrol operations in an area, Teams helps provide information to a wide number of users in record time.

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In the movies, a getaway car squeals away from the scene of a crime, the police tap a glowing smartphone, and a network of satellites and supercomputers springs into action. Detailed information flashes across the dashboard of every police car in the city, and the hunt is on. In the real world, police work, right now, is far less flashy. “In reality, it's a very time-consuming and tedious paper process to get everything into the system,” explains Police Officer Jens Back, Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD).

There has been an effort in place for some time to get the LAPD closer to that high-speed Hollywood ideal, but an organization with more than 10,000 officers and staff using yellow pencils and clipboards doesn’t change at the speed of a car chase. But it might change at the speed of a pandemic. When COVID-19 struck, the department needed to find ways for officers to interact without the face-to-face meetings and hand-carried paperwork that had underpinned the system for decades. An initial activation of Microsoft Teams to facilitate these meetings led to a rapid, widespread adoption of it across the department, supporting faster communication, better coordination, and a new paradigm in information sharing for officers on patrol.

Top down and bottom up

The information technology division had been trying to ramp up the department’s ability to hold video meetings for years, but it was an idea that was slow to gain traction. Face-to-face meetings were the standard, and many people saw no reason to change a system that was working. Sergeant Robert Bean is a 17-year veteran of the LAPD who has been working as an aide to Deputy Chief John McMahon, Commanding Officer and Chief Information Technology Officer for the force, in helping to increase the department’s use of technology.

“I'd had meetings beforehand internally about how we were going to try to get people to use Teams and other services that provided video conferencing and all these different things, and the response was, ‘We've always done face-to-face meetings.’ So how are we going to try to get them to shift to do this? How do we get them to evolve?” Sgt. Bean says COVID-19 acted as a fulcrum that quickly shifted the idea of virtual meetings from a top-down suggestion that met with resistance to a desirable solution that rank-and-file officers were clamoring for.

Police officers continued to come into the bureau each day while most other desk workers stayed home, but they maintained as much physical distance as possible. Morning roll call and uniform inspections moved outdoors, and internal meetings that would have been in conference rooms were held quasi-remotely with each officer in the bureau at his or her own desk. It didn’t take long for even the longest-serving veterans of the force to see the value of being able to set up quick meetings at short notice.

“Sometimes the hardest people to get to use it are the ones who've been engrained in these systems the longest, and the first couple of meetings it was hard to win them over. Now, everyone says, ‘Oh, we’ll just set up a Teams meeting, here's the link,’” Sgt. Bean notes.

Specialized units, like auto theft or narcotics, that had regular area-wide face-to-face meetings quickly came to appreciate the shift to Teams video meetings. In a metropolis as sprawling as Los Angeles—which is as famous for its terrible traffic as its great weather—video meetings mean a significant savings in travel time, a precious commodity for officers who are already stretched thin.

A coordinated response to vice

The San Fernando Valley is an urban area north of Los Angeles that covers 260 square miles and is home to almost 2 million people. It was one of the first command areas where the LAPD spun Teams out from its new use for meetings and put it to work in the field as an experiment in increasing coordination. The Vice Unit there deals with complex, interconnected issues involving prostitution, gambling, and alcohol violations. Information travels within and between individual police stations in the area and eventually rises up to the level of the wider bureau, often through informal channels of texts or phone calls between officers who happen to know each other. “There was no centralized way to communicate information,” Sgt. Bean explains. Once Vice set up a Teams chat group, “it essentially allowed everyone within the San Fernando Valley to communicate,” he adds. Where information trickled before, now it flowed across the entire area, allowing coordination of, for example, alcohol control operations.

Clearer information sharing also supports rapid, high-stakes decision making. “There’s nothing worse than having to make a split-second decision and not being supported by the information you need,” Sgt. Bean says. Officers in the field have found that uploading photos and files to SharePoint in Teams makes the information they need available right when they need it. For example, being able to double-check the photo of a vehicle suspected of being used in a kidnapping before a traffic stop could prove invaluable. Unlike a radio transmission, having a digital record of the files used creates a clear chain of evidence that can be used in later incident reviews. The security of Microsoft Azure Government makes these communications compliant for sharing sensitive personally identifying information and for fulfilling document retention requirements. Other units have taken note of how Vice is using Teams, and Teams channel implementations are starting to spread across the department by word of mouth.

A force magnifier

The experience of the Vice Unit offers a glimpse of the possibilities when improved communication enhances the ability of officers in the field to coordinate. Near-instantaneous information sharing across the entire watch multiplies the number of eyes and ears on any given case, allowing an officer working far from the original crime scene to pick up a clue to be added to the collective knowledge base. “One little piece of information could unlock something someone else has, and without having the ability to put that out there, you can't put these puzzle pieces together to make the connection,” Sgt. Bean explains. “It really magnifies the workforce.” It’s easier to find a shared document in SharePoint in Teams than to scroll back through unwieldy email chains, and it’s a huge leap forward from looking for something under a pile of papers on a desk.

Officer Back sees Teams use as a “first step off the ground” toward a greater integration of technology throughout the department. He says it opens the door to streamlining other processes, like eventually being able to email those pencil-written police reports. And it has gotten people throughout the department to start thinking about ways they can expand the use of the tools, like smartphones, that they already have.

As Officer Back puts it, “Teams helps bridge the gap between what the public expects our capabilities to be and what they actually are.”

“I'd had meetings beforehand internally about how we were going to try to get people to use Teams and other services that provided video conferencing and all these different things, and the response was, ‘We've always done face-to-face meetings.’ So how are we going to try to get them to shift to do this? How do we get them to evolve?”

Sergeant Robert Bean, Aide to the Chief Technology Advisor, Los Angeles Police Department

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