Software improves officer safety, communication among smaller police agencies

MARION - The Iowa Department of Transportation wants to expand efforts to help large and small police departments around Iowa get a technological leg up to make those departments more efficient and improve officer safety.

Marion and Hiawatha Police Departments were two recent partners with the Iowa DOT's motor vehicle enforcement division, which in turn deploys the software and provides support.

In November 2014, the DOT office installed Mobile Architecture for Communications Handling, or MACH, in Marion and Hiawatha police cruisers, and trained both departments how to use it. Among the features, MACH offers automated vehicle location mapping, interagency communication capabilities, and geographical imagery for incident locations.

The software is accessible to dispatchers and, more important, remotely to officers in their cruisers.

'Essentially it's real-time mapping of all the resources and all of the people an officer may need to rely on,” Hiawatha Police Chief Dennis Marks said.

Tools such as MACH and Traffic and Criminal Software, or TraCS, which is the other main system the DOT office supports, can put more resources and information in the hands of officers in the field. The technology, if used properly, can save lives, help coordinate responses when multiple agencies respond to an incident, and more efficiently compile crash and crime data.

As part of a budget request to the Iowa Legislature, the Iowa DOT wants to expand the office from two programmers to four, and is asking for an individual $300,000 line item for supporting MACH and TraCS.

'It's been such a success we've outgrown our resources,” said Josh Halterman, an Iowa DOT program manager for the TraCS system. 'We are such a small group that we can't get to all of the updates for software applications. We have a limited deployment capacity.”

The Iowa DOT has installed MACH in 93 law enforcement agencies around Iowa and has a waitlist of at least 17 more, Halterman said. It's a similar situation with other systems under development, such as a computer-aided dispatching system that digitizes incident information so it's instantaneously visible on laptops in police cruisers.

With MACH, officers can map in real-time the locations of any user logged into the system. In addition to the 93 agencies on the system, state patrol, state motor vehicle enforcement, and the Iowa Department of Natural Resources also use MACH.

In an emergency situation an officer can employ MACH to locate the nearest backup and can communicate directly through direct messaging functions. In many departments, dispatch coordinates those interactions.

Retrieving driver's license photos, information about vehicle or guns, and aerial satellite imagery of an incident location also can be done from the squad car.

'It was originally designed for officer safety and interoperability with other agencies,” Marion Police Lt. Mark Merta said. 'Anybody who has this software in the state is on the system.

'They can communicate one-on-one or invite them into a chat if they are handling an emergency.”

Merta and Marks said they have not had an emergency situation yet, but the software is used daily and it functions well.

The state pays an $80,000 licensing fee to use MACH, which then can be deployed to as many departments as request it, pending availability of staff. The software is free to law enforcement agencies aside from a $1 per unit monthly user fee.

The support is available to both small budget rural police departments and larger operations, such as Marion, Hiawatha, Waterloo and Black Hawk County, Halterman said.

While increased communication and safety is desirable, software such as MACH and TraCS is not going to be a fit for every agency, he said.

Cedar Rapids police and the Linn County Sheriff's Office use Integraph's Mobile for Public Safety to share location information with officers and dispatch, instead of MACH. But Cedar Rapids does use TraCS to electronically process drunken driving arrests, report accidents and electronically process citation, said Greg Buelow, Cedar Rapids public safety spokesman.

Linn County Sheriff Brian Gardner said his office looked into MACH but determined it may not be compatible with other programs and may overload the system. Being able to map locations from cruisers would be a valuable tool and something his office will continue to explore, he said.

'Especially when responding in another jurisdiction, you know where backups are, you know where the incidents are, and you drive to that location on the map,” Gardner said.