Public Safety: Implementing Sustainable Technology

Today, we dive deep into the world of sustainable technology with our special guest, Michael, Senior Manager of Avero's public safety practice. Join us as we explore the intricacies of selecting and implementing sustainable tech solutions for modernizing governments and public safety agencies nationwide.

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Transcript

00;00;00;20 - 00;00;28;25
Speaker 1
Welcome to Untangled. Whether you are a local government leader tirelessly searching for trailblazing solutions to operational hurdles in it professional with a zeal for public sector technology or a curious mind intrigued by the symbiosis of technology and governance. Untangled is your platform. Join us on this fascinating journey as we explore how technology can revolutionize local governments. Effective, sustainable, cutting edge solutions are not just for the deep pockets.

00;00;28;25 - 00;00;33;17
Speaker 1
Private sector anymore. Let's get untangled.

00;00;33;19 - 00;00;55;17
Speaker 2
Morning and welcome to Avero Live on this very special Wednesday. I have a I have a special guest today. Michael is the senior manager of Avero and he leads our public safety practice. And we're going to talk about sustainable technology and how do you. How do you go about choosing it and how to keep up with it primarily?

00;00;55;18 - 00;01;19;15
Speaker 2
So before we get into that, I want to just, you know, tell you about where we are, an independent technology agnostic consulting firm that focuses on modernizing governments across the country and that includes public safety. And we do that through I.T., strategic planning, efficient business process, redesign, and helping you pick the right technology, because there's a lot out there.

00;01;19;17 - 00;01;59;08
Speaker 2
Technology changes a lot, and it changes pretty rapidly. So how do you know what's best for your agency or organization? And that's where we come in. We become your trusted advisor in helping you not only select the strategies are you go from 30 year old technology stack to something in the 19, you know, in the 21st century. So with that, I'm going to I'm going to open up, by the way, we go live every Wednesday at the same time 10am Eastern and and bring on special guests like Mike today who our partners here at Avero or part of the team or are industry stalwarts.

00;01;59;08 - 00;02;13;14
Speaker 2
And Mike happens to be both. Mike, welcome to the show again. Tell us a little bit about your background. I know you've spent many years in public safety, but let's just start there.

00;02;13;16 - 00;02;40;13
Speaker 3
Good morning. Thank you for having me on. Sure. I spent 34 years in public safety. I worked at both county environment, working under a county board of supervisors as well as city municipal police department, working for city council mayor, former government. I worked most of my time on the command staff. I've been everything from officer to chief and I spent many, many years running technology for the wealthiest municipality in Arizona.

00;02;40;15 - 00;02;45;27
Speaker 3
So not only implementing procuring, but maintaining it, making sure it stayed current.

00;02;45;29 - 00;03;11;09
Speaker 2
And that's how Mike and I met. Mike used to be a client. I've got a track record of two former clients that now work with me just is. I take that as a badge of honors. Thank you for your trust as a client and as as a as a network here at Avero Mike, let's talk about the topic at hand. Sustainable implementing sustainable technology.

00;03;11;09 - 00;03;23;18
Speaker 2
Are you talking about green technology and how to make public safety vehicles more economic, you know, and eco friendly? What are you talking about?

00;03;23;20 - 00;03;53;02
Speaker 3
Well, that would be great, but that's not really the primary focus. You know, we were the first in the state to implement electric motorcycle. So we get our share of the green stuff where we could. But it's not always, always possible. No, we're actually talking about selecting and implementing technology that will stay current over the course of your agency's lifespan and contracts implementations that allow you to enhance that technology as technology grows changes and so it doesn't become stale.

00;03;53;04 - 00;04;09;23
Speaker 3
We work with a lot of agencies. I knew a lot of agencies personally. We were one of them that, you know, you implement a technology and you think that's the Holy Grail and you're good and five years down the road you haven't really maintained it or kept up with it or paid attention. And it's now still and it's time to replace it.

00;04;09;23 - 00;04;30;05
Speaker 3
And it's just in a place where it's really not working the way that you intended. And it's it's really hard to go back to your council and say, Hey, I need another $2 million because it's really not working now. And I know you gave it to me in five years ago, but I need more money now. And if you can show the success of the project, can you go back to your council and say, this is a thing that's provided for us, It's the benefits we've gotten out of it and it's time to refresh it.

00;04;30;11 - 00;04;32;05
Speaker 3
It's a lot easier sell.

00;04;32;08 - 00;04;57;16
Speaker 2
So when you say sustainable, it's it's primarily a how do you afford it? One, because sustainability is not just in terms of the tech you're buying. It's also how do you sustain your budget because things come up, you know, midyear if you haven't planned for this. And we're big proponents of strategic planning and laying out what it is you're buying and how it's going to be useful and how are you going to pay for it.

00;04;57;18 - 00;05;15;25
Speaker 2
So the sustainability starts there, the planning phase. And then when you buy a certain thing, you want to make sure that it's the right thing, that it's going to last you for a long time and that it's going to be useful to your agency Mike did I capture that right?

00;05;15;27 - 00;05;39;21
Speaker 3
Yeah, you did. You actually jump down to one of my one of my lower bullet points was ongoing replacement funding. And that is a big issue. And it starts early and often. You you want to communicate the benefits of what you're doing with your funding authority. Whether thats a town council, whether that's a county board of supervisors, whoever you report to and you get your funding from, and you need to really make them understand.

00;05;39;21 - 00;05;56;16
Speaker 3
Sometimes I’ve sat in front of councils and the last thing you want to hear them say when they spent two or three or $4 million on a project, then I'm glad we'll never do that again. In your city, in your mind, they have their five year contract in five years. This comes due again. And so they didn't really understand.

00;05;56;16 - 00;06;23;29
Speaker 3
You want them to understand that the investment, the technology is ongoing. It's not one time, but to make it more palatable for those authorities, it's it's easier for us if we can break it down into segments. So like if I could lease equipment over a five year lifespan and manage annual payments over those five years that are the same every five years, I would do that over a one time purchase because again, they might go 2 million never have to do that again and then they get to ask for another 2 million.

00;06;23;29 - 00;06;48;15
Speaker 3
If they're used to committing $300,000 a year every year for a certain technology that we've implemented, it's really easy. At the end of that five year contract when we have to renew to say, it's just $300,000. You ever been paying, you're used to paying that you budgeted for it, and so it makes it easier for them. There were some obviously equipment issues that we couldn't lease like that.

00;06;48;15 - 00;07;13;16
Speaker 3
And what we would try to do is create a long term technology forecast. So we would look at those spikes in life cycles when, you know, this is a three year life cycle, this is the five. And we would try to plan those out over the course of ten budget years so that it stayed almost the same. Our funding request for technology would stay almost the same if if say, we had laptops replacement at three years in the past.

00;07;13;16 - 00;07;31;15
Speaker 3
And that was going to be a big spike because maybe gateways in the cards came up that same year, we'd put one of them and say, okay, four, then replace that at four years so that it just evens out that curve of what we're asking you to invest in it. And then I think the other a couple of important things are signing long term maintenance agreements.

00;07;31;18 - 00;07;53;19
Speaker 3
Those maintenance agreements have percentage spikes pretty much every year. And so making long term agreements allows you to know what those cost increases are going to be over a longer period. So there's no surprises. And then finally again, it goes back to communicating with your your governing authority, creating metrics for success. And I'll just give you an example and sharing them.

00;07;53;19 - 00;08;20;01
Speaker 3
We we implemented a multimillion dollar license plate reader system, and one of our metrics for success was the part of the value of property that we recovered due to a license plate reader hits that we wouldn't have recovered. And we were going to our council on a regular basis and providing updates on their investment in that technology. And we're showing a tax return on recovered stolen property for our residents versus what we actually spent to implement it.

00;08;20;01 - 00;08;28;04
Speaker 3
And it just shows a great return on investment and it generates that enthusiasm in our council that they want to continue this program. They're willing to invest in it.

00;08;28;06 - 00;08;52;24
Speaker 2
Yeah, but how did you start? Because that's when we met, like it seems like 50 years ago. But isn't that wrong? Word was maybe centralized, but you know, when when we when we met, when I came in to do a 90 strategic plan for or the town, you you were in the middle of this implementation, you were doing Yelpers, you're doing a mess.

00;08;52;24 - 00;09;33;06
Speaker 2
You're overhauling the whole, you know, the ecosystem for the that couple of the but how that started, because it's a smaller an asset municipality with got with big, you know fund balances I remember and but there had to be a trigger sort of the catalyst for them saying go ahead man recall bring those you know and at one point that municipality was, I think, the most cutting edge speed in in the U.S. and maybe therefore in the world.

00;09;33;08 - 00;09;33;17
Speaker 3
Right.

00;09;33;25 - 00;09;35;12
Speaker 2
That's all that.

00;09;35;14 - 00;09;58;11
Speaker 3
Sure. A little bit longer story, but I'll I'll make it as brief as possible. So it's it it is per capita in the wealthiest municipality in Arizona, one of them in the country, very small, very affluent bedroom community right in the heart of Phenix Metro area, right between Phenix and Scottsdale, fifth largest municipal area in the country. And we had a very, very low crime rate because we had good budgets.

00;09;58;11 - 00;10;19;17
Speaker 3
We hired a lot of officers per capita, and we were very aggressive about pulling over people that were doing the crimes that didn't belong there, that just a big show of visibility to keep those people out of our town. And because we had such a low, low crime rate, we had a town manager for a long time that didn't want to invest in technology.

00;10;19;17 - 00;10;43;04
Speaker 3
His and his thought process was we don't have the time really to justify spending millions in technology. That's just not the crime there. And to some point, he was correct. At the end of 2012, we had a spike in residential burglary percentages. That was the big crime in our town, multimillion dollar homes that were worried about people breaking into their homes.

00;10;43;06 - 00;11;00;07
Speaker 3
And so at the end of Q4, we showed a spike in residential burglary percentages that were coming off the tail end of the recession. We had great community support. Our residents got very concerned about the increase in burglaries. They went to the council and said, What did you do to our police department during the recession? We want their funding restored.

00;11;00;07 - 00;11;24;15
Speaker 3
We want them to be the leaders in technology. We demand that you give them whatever they need to solve this problem. They were pointing the finger at us or pointing to the council and saying, Give them what they need. And so that's where my position was created. There was a task force created by the council consisting of council and town members, and they pretty much wrote me a blank check and said, you know, you guys are so far behind the technology curve because we haven't had crime.

00;11;24;18 - 00;11;46;04
Speaker 3
We want you to be the leaders in the state, if not at the nation and very wealthy business value point check and said you go investigate whatever the cutting edge technology is. You don't pay up and you are committed as soon as possible. And that's what happened. In retrospect, the burglary rates resolve themselves pretty quickly because we had such a low crime rate.

00;11;46;06 - 00;12;04;15
Speaker 3
I think there was only three or four additional residential burglaries over that quarter that caused that spike. But in their perception, this was a huge problem. And so that's kind of where you came in. You came in, I think, about halfway through our implementation on all this technology. And we did we got it implemented and we were bleeding edge.

00;12;04;15 - 00;12;10;21
Speaker 3
People from all over the country come out to see what we were doing. And that's when your firm came in and we're back.

00;12;10;24 - 00;12;23;18
Speaker 2
Yeah. And I was one of your first test victims. I don't know if you remember this, but I was a I wasn't speeding, but I was on. I had a knife.

00;12;23;18 - 00;12;25;02
Speaker 3
For the also.

00;12;25;04 - 00;12;31;28
Speaker 2
I would I was. I was busted by your newly installed cactus cans.

00;12;32;00 - 00;12;33;00
Speaker 3
yes, I remember.

00;12;33;03 - 00;12;54;07
Speaker 2
I get back home to I was living in Baltimore. I get back home and there's a ticket waiting for me at. I called you guys and I said, Hey, it works now. Can you get rid of this? And it didn't. So you hold up against it. But no, you know, going back to sustainable that that's a cool story right?

00;12;54;07 - 00;13;19;25
Speaker 2
It because it it it was sort of public generated now that's an anomaly right? Smaller town affluent town. They can write you a blank check. So let's talk about that. If county council says, tell me what you need, Commander, how did you come up with a number without knowing, you know, exactly what you're going to implement and what time frame and is it going to work?

00;13;19;27 - 00;13;41;05
Speaker 3
Yeah, that required a lot of groundwork. And it wasn't, you know, we didn't just go to them. Okay, here's what we need. We started looking at what technologies were available. We started going out and doing site visits to determine which would the appropriate venues were. And then from there we decided how that gets implemented in our municipality, what it looks like and what the long term costs are going to be.

00;13;41;07 - 00;13;54;06
Speaker 3
So it was a lot of planning to get to get to that state. Yeah, it's different if your council says, Here's $2 million, see what you can do with it versus we want you to go out and get everything and tell us what it's going to cost you.

00;13;54;08 - 00;14;29;20
Speaker 2
And, you know, you you know, again, another factor in sustainable technology is is being able to pivot. Right. Was you have to go back a couple of years in and say, look, the estimates were wrong either way up or down. And that communication piece with council, with your command staff, with chief budget officers, what have you, is a key component in keeping things sustainable because you if you shy away from those discussions and get locked in to five years ago pricing and funding, that doesn't work anymore.

00;14;29;22 - 00;14;32;04
Speaker 2
You're not going to be sustainable.

00;14;32;07 - 00;14;54;22
Speaker 3
Sure. And I mean, that happened to us. Of course it happens to everybody. We had to I mean, we had a big ticket item, LPA vendor told us and all in cost to the council and then after we got a funding approval for it, came back and said, well, that doesn't include installation. When we said all in, it wasn't really all in that we had to go back and say and another almost million dollars for installation on this.

00;14;54;22 - 00;15;09;16
Speaker 3
And that's hard to do. And that's a part of, you know, hiring a firm with a world where we have the experience and these things that we can help you avoid some of those pitfalls. Because, you know, I don't want to say I'm the smartest guy in the room. I've made a lot of mistakes and I've learned from them.

00;15;09;16 - 00;15;14;06
Speaker 3
And if I can help other people avoid them, and that's one of the reasons.

00;15;14;08 - 00;15;24;25
Speaker 2
Yeah. And we've done that by meeting. We get name names. We recently say what bills and a half dollar investment in an hour and this from a in.

00;15;24;25 - 00;15;25;07
Speaker 3
The last.

00;15;25;14 - 00;15;28;16
Speaker 2
Year that would have been in the same position if not for.

00;15;28;19 - 00;15;46;14
Speaker 3
You. Right And that's horrible. I know of an agency that's been through three CAD implementations in five years and the third one's not working either. And you look at the cost, not just the cost to elect council with, but that your employees time morale building, five years of constant implementations ever work and it's just defeat.

00;15;46;17 - 00;16;12;29
Speaker 2
Yeah. How did you how did you do it. Meaning I mean it was yeah, you got funding. You convince council rather council convince you to do this and, and then you got to see a lot of things like that to scam. For example, it was novel. It was interesting. Right. We've seen cell cellular antennas put into palm trees, but on big campuses was something.

00;16;13;01 - 00;16;13;19
Speaker 3
That that's one.

00;16;13;19 - 00;16;17;16
Speaker 2
That you guys made it into in some newspaper or national public.

00;16;17;16 - 00;16;47;26
Speaker 3
Case we could doing that. But I'm not intentionally you know it goes back to communication on you need to be upfront about the stuff, especially stuff where you think your public might have some concerns, you know, whether it's you're using a I know facial recognition or you're recording license plates, they have a lot of concerns. So having a clear policy on how it will be used, how what you how long the data will be retained and being upfront about it so that the cactus cam is interesting story.

00;16;47;28 - 00;17;07;00
Speaker 3
We were installing license plate readers everywhere. We had infrastructure, so where we had traffic lights and traffic poles, we put them on the traffic lights and traffic lights. But you have to understand this is a very wealthy municipality that spends a lot of money on streets, landscaping, beautification. And we had a couple of roundabouts that had just gone in that they spent a lot of money on.

00;17;07;00 - 00;17;35;06
Speaker 3
And through that we needed LPR out there and you know, our public works director just shook his head and I can't put a poll with a camera in the middle of this. I just spent 1.2 million on beautifying this roundabout. I can't put a bare metal camera hanging. And so we got the idea. We had a hidden cell sites all throughout town, small cells in in fake cactuses, obviously cactus, which are very popular.

00;17;35;06 - 00;17;52;04
Speaker 3
They're all over our city in Arizona. And so they came up with the idea of let's just use the same vendor to create a small cactus instead of putting a cell side in there, but a license plate out of here in the areas where we don't have infrastructure hanging on. And so I think we had three of those out of 17 installations and they looked great.

00;17;52;04 - 00;18;02;08
Speaker 3
You go by and and they look like cactus. Unless you look amulets bonded, hold it with a camera behind it. But you had a time in your.

00;18;02;10 - 00;18;06;29
Speaker 2
Brain here what would the it to scan the can't.

00;18;07;02 - 00;18;10;05
Speaker 3
You've got that you've got a bedroom.

00;18;10;08 - 00;18;11;00
Speaker 2
But it's not so.

00;18;11;06 - 00;18;13;17
Speaker 3
Anyway.

00;18;13;19 - 00;18;14;19
Speaker 2
They go.

00;18;14;21 - 00;18;28;23
Speaker 3
There. That's what it looked like. So we had a town manager that was very nervous about messaging and I went to him and I said, Look, we need to get out in front of this, tell the public this is what we're doing. It's only in three installations where there's no infrastructure to put it on the rest of or out where everybody can see it.

00;18;28;23 - 00;18;44;23
Speaker 3
We put maps on our website. Here's where they're at. We didn't either, though. We publicized it. And I said, we need to tell people we're going to put them in these cameras and tell them why and tell them all the installations that don't hint cactuses that are just out visible. And he got worried. He spent a week trying to figure out the messaging.

00;18;44;23 - 00;19;04;04
Speaker 3
And before he got a message out, somebody noticed it. Somebody called the paper and it was all over the media that were hiding cameras in Cactus. Now, which was not really the case, but I could certainly see the public. And you know, that again, goes back to you need to be upfront with your public on what you're doing, why you're doing it.

00;19;04;06 - 00;19;15;06
Speaker 2
Yeah. And so what you know, at the end of the day, Mike So here's another it's called being called cacti. No, it was ever mentioned before.

00;19;15;08 - 00;19;32;20
Speaker 3
And those things were very expensive. I think we spent like $200,000 on each cactus implementation. So it wasn't like we were doing anything to try and save money or it was very expensive for us to do this. I was just about the esthetic look of the landscape in the area.

00;19;32;22 - 00;19;48;02
Speaker 2
I, I it was interesting. It got me, like I said. So what else did you all do? It was was So I remember you doing Yelpers you didn't miss overhauled into marginally better.

00;19;48;08 - 00;20;01;04
Speaker 3
Look, we did a record management system. We did a computer aided dispatch system, new APHIS, automated fingerprint system, a new mugshot capture system, Camera cameras. Cool.

00;20;01;07 - 00;20;03;20
Speaker 2
I remember your handrails.

00;20;03;22 - 00;20;05;06
Speaker 3
Too. Yeah.

00;20;05;09 - 00;20;12;05
Speaker 2
Those were super high end. You could do fingerprints, Iris, seal, blood sample.

00;20;12;07 - 00;20;42;14
Speaker 3
Yep. All of it. So you car cameras in the cars, body worn cameras, computers in the cars, which we never had before. Which, of course, requires gateways in the cars on the license plate reader system. We had a ring around the town with license plate readers. I would read any cars coming into town. You know, we subscribe to accurate crime analytics packages, just so much stuff.

00;20;42;14 - 00;20;46;20
Speaker 3
It's it's mind numbing, almost how much stuff we put out in a short period of time.

00;20;46;22 - 00;20;58;22
Speaker 2
And I also remember drones were kind of they were there at the time, but you you didn't you didn't quite go that far. What field? I'm going too far.

00;20;58;24 - 00;21;12;22
Speaker 3
I imagine my agency is doing some pretty innovative stuff with drones now. But no, at the time the technology was really there and we were doing so much that we felt like we just needed to start. There were so many basics that we needed that, that it wasn't enough to worry about that it's done.

00;21;12;25 - 00;21;34;21
Speaker 2
And so looking, looking ahead that you finished that project, Successful Crime goes down. And I think that and then the council said, Now what do we do? We have more data. Can you give us analytics? Can you? So that it turned into more of a intelligence project after that there?

00;21;34;24 - 00;22;02;15
Speaker 3
Right. Well, and again, I go back to communication. You said crime went down and and in reality we did drive crime down. But on crime numbers went up because you got to realize we were catching so many more people now than we were before that it and we communicated this to our council. Hey, don't be surprised if our crime numbers start to go up because license plate with all over town, not license plate readers on cars, we got all this cool technology we're utilizing.

00;22;02;17 - 00;22;20;18
Speaker 3
We're going to catch more people. It's not that they weren't there, that the crime is going up. They were there. We weren't. Catch them. Now we're catching and we're driving right now. So that's that's absolutely the case. Yeah. So I mean, what's all this stuff as in, you know, we hear from a lot of employees and a lot of agencies that are worried.

00;22;20;21 - 00;22;42;03
Speaker 3
I do all the stuff. I mean, athletes stuff off because they're going to be so much more efficient and that I've never seen that happen. When we become way more efficient, we just do our jobs in different ways. And you're right, the data analytics behind it creates new and unique jobs and opportunities for people. And we can visualize what we're doing, why we're doing it in a much more efficient way.

00;22;42;03 - 00;23;06;25
Speaker 3
And third way for council. And you know, just one example, you're following a body worn camera program and people don't realize how much time reduction takes and how much staff aren't. Depending on your public records laws, you have to release everything or we had to release pretty much everything, which means we had to redact. We've got two cameras on every car, we've got a camera on every cop.

00;23;06;27 - 00;23;25;09
Speaker 3
We got to a scene and there's four or five officers. You may have ten or 15 different video feeds of two or 3 hours. Somebody's got to watch and redact. And and there's been a lot of changes that that don't take that far ahead and implemented, you know, body worn camera program and then shutter it because they don't have staff to redact and and legally they can't comply.

00;23;25;12 - 00;23;49;24
Speaker 2
Well not just that storage right how do you this I know this cloud solutions but you know that therein lies the you know devil's in the details, right. How much is that going to cost you? It depends on how much you're going to produce. And now it comes down to setting policies on it. When you leave it open, do you auto, you know, record when certain things happen that idea are amiss and CAD?

00;23;49;24 - 00;24;14;16
Speaker 2
So when you enter a certain area it turns on so the tech can do it all, but you need to come up with those policies that that tell the tech that this is what I want you to do or the agency wants you to do. And that has a direct impact on on budgets. So talk to me about how you handled it and how you think agencies, because it will go back to data analytics.

00;24;14;16 - 00;24;45;11
Speaker 2
I missed that part because we were also working on a preschool project together on very public safety data into zoning violations and things. And so it becomes important not just from a PD standpoint, but also a citywide management. But back to my back, my other on your iPhone first, Siri, my other point on sustainability, right? It what are your thoughts on that?

00;24;45;13 - 00;25;10;03
Speaker 3
So you need a plan for it ahead of time. You know you're right The the data storage cost can get out of control very quickly. So having it and I preach this all the time, any time you implement a new technology, you need to look at use cases, how your department wants to use it, and you need to have a strong policy procedure in place on it, letting your staff and the public know this is how it will be used.

00;25;10;03 - 00;25;35;09
Speaker 3
This is how it will not be used. This is what we're doing with the data and you can adjust that. I mean, if your data is getting out of control, you can adjust when your client come on or off. But, you know, I'd be remiss if I didn't say on the other end of that policy procedure, you've got to have a good plan in place to audit this technology and never one to make sure that the vendor is performing as anticipated, that it's actually doing what they told you it will do correctly.

00;25;35;11 - 00;26;00;12
Speaker 3
But number two is staff, because we're all creatures of habit. And and if there is a way to do it easier than than the right way of a lot of us a lot of our staff will fall into that. And so having supervisors who have a specific audit policy on it that will go out and make sure it's being used the way that we intended for it to be used, and we're getting the right the right return on the investment.

00;26;00;14 - 00;26;18;01
Speaker 3
But you're right that the storage costs are crazy and, you know, I think a lot of that goes with doing your due diligence. So if you're going to go with particular software packages for audio cameras, go talk to an agency that and if this is your first implementation, you probably don't have any idea of what storage costs are going to be like.

00;26;18;03 - 00;26;53;26
Speaker 3
We'll talk to agencies that have implemented and say, you know, what size are you rolling per year on your storage per officer so we can scale that to. RS And what are your policies on when are you required picture on very large trade off and then we can get a general idea now that a five year contract to realize what our storage is going to look like and it gives you a better idea for what your long term funding is going to be and and on the backside, that is, you know, knowing when you can purge that data and setting those those records so that there's there's a way to automatically purge data.

00;26;53;26 - 00;27;13;01
Speaker 3
Maybe it's when the the case is adjudicated and the prosecutor says you can maybe it's just something simple that if it's not classified as prime, we keep six months in which off the server. But there's a way long term hold that if it becomes a homicide case, we're going to have to keep forever. Yeah.

00;27;13;03 - 00;27;25;24
Speaker 2
Is there is there ever case, Mike, for onsite on premise storage or are you going to run out at a really quick rate that you can't that's not practical.

00;27;25;26 - 00;27;51;01
Speaker 3
Yeah, well, you know, I, I hate to say never if it's a small agency with a small deployment on, I suppose you could make a case for on site, but that really everything is going to be based. It's, it's really cheaper in the long run to do it that way. You've got the expansion that you need. You don't have to worry about backups.

00;27;51;03 - 00;28;14;07
Speaker 3
I've seen agencies storing stuff on a non backed up servers or even on standalone hard drives. That's evidentiary in nature. And if those things fail, it's really hard to step to the mike and explain why you lost a major case because you stored a critical piece of evidence on a hard drive that failed, that wasn't backed up. You just don't have those concerns when you go to the cloud.

00;28;14;09 - 00;28;15;20
Speaker 3
Yeah.

00;28;15;22 - 00;28;43;12
Speaker 2
So going back to sustainability, what you know, I know you're not at that agency anymore, but I know you've got that, you know, connections and you keep in touch. Then what happened? Because it's been ten years since you implemented those technologies with all of that money, blank check was you know, people one the sustainable. Have they kept up?

00;28;43;12 - 00;29;00;03
Speaker 2
Have they what did they have to do as it as they came to sort of end of life on some of the tech some things got obsolete within ten years. How did they stay sustainable and what kind of measures had you built in as you implement at least these technologies?

00;29;00;05 - 00;29;23;24
Speaker 3
That's a great question. We realized pretty quickly that this technology was going to be overwhelming force if we didn't get a handle on it. And so my primary function was I was responsible for everything technology related department. And so I created a stakeholder group of system admins for each piece of the technology. So those people on that, they understood it.

00;29;24;02 - 00;29;43;00
Speaker 3
And we had standing meetings weekly where I was the authority maker. I had the authority to make any decisions we needed to do to deal with vendors. You've got to have somebody who has that kind of authority to get things done and then we would just meet and we would talk about what problems are we having with the software, what do we need to do to get it?

00;29;43;00 - 00;30;03;09
Speaker 3
Fix it. Dwight Interview The vendor need to implement some new patch. What do we need to do? Run through those issues? We would talk about required system changes, so a lot of times we would get officers or staff on civilian stands that would say, you know, we want to make this change the system. It it would be really cool.

00;30;03;11 - 00;30;21;21
Speaker 3
The problem is a lot of times you don't realize how making a change in one system affects what's happening in the others for the integrate. And so we would talk about it before anybody made any system out and the changes we would talk about and say this is what's being requested, I think that's a good idea. How does it affect everybody else's software?

00;30;21;21 - 00;30;47;12
Speaker 3
Is it going to be a problem? So we didn't end up with those unanticipated consequences. We we would evaluate new technologies. We would we would find out about them. We stayed very involved. I would ITP every year I went to the end vendor exhibit hall and get all the new technologies. I and some of my staff went to ICP as Law Enforcement Information Technology Group.

00;30;47;15 - 00;31;09;09
Speaker 3
So we were members and we went to that annual conference and we looked at the vendor hall at the Information Technology Conference. We joined user groups, we attended conferences, we started relationships with people that had agency. They had similar technologies around us to talk about what issues are you having, where are you heading, what's next for you? And so we would look at those things and we would stay very current.

00;31;09;09 - 00;31;31;11
Speaker 3
We would talk about what do we need to plan for? That's that's the next big thing that's coming up. What kind of groundwork do we need to do so that we're ready for that? And we would talk about those things every week to make sure that we were ready. We were dealing with the problems we had. We were aware of what's coming out and we were preparing the groundwork for the next slide.

00;31;31;14 - 00;31;53;28
Speaker 3
And that, I think, is is crucial. I see a lot of agencies that are in the same boat that they're in. They say, you know, we had this technology, we implemented it, it's five years, it's ten years, 15 years later. We've never actually upgraded it, done anything. It doesn't really do we need it to do it. They don't know what to do with it, but nobody's really taken responsibility for that overall technology umbrella of agency in.

00;31;54;01 - 00;32;10;16
Speaker 3
And I just tell them, you know, we can help you with your current, but if you don't do something like that, so you're paying attention to it on a weekly basis, you're going to end up in the same position in three or five years and not millions of dollars from your counsel and do it in near the same boat.

00;32;10;16 - 00;32;29;24
Speaker 3
So somebody really and it's hard for us as cops because a lot of us are not really technologically savvy. So having a great relationship with your I.T department is another crucial and we see a lot of times that i.t and pd are really not communicating. They have to be a partnership in that. I appreciate.

00;32;29;26 - 00;32;55;27
Speaker 2
It. So let's talk about that. You said you were the leader of tech for your pd. How did you foster that relationship with central i.t or the overall i.t. Director Because you're right, it's important we and we see this everywhere, almost everywhere we go. Right? There's there's a little bit of a rub on pd being part of the city.

00;32;55;29 - 00;33;25;21
Speaker 2
They're part of the environment and the infrastructure that the overall city has. And then PD wants to move faster with certain things because they've got certain grants or leadership that must move faster. City I.t doesn't for good reason. Right? Security overall funding. And to your point, police chiefs or commanders don't necessarily understand why they can have this you one shiny thing right now, like you say in retail and well, we don't have the infrastructure for it.

00;33;25;24 - 00;33;40;16
Speaker 2
We don't have the whatever bandwidth so what have you a good understanding of how technology works from a from a nuts and bolts IP perspective is really important. So how did you navigate all of this?

00;33;40;18 - 00;33;58;15
Speaker 3
Sure. Well, initially when we got this funding, we were given an I.T position at PD. They report to me and that was, you know, the holy Grail that things were great during that period of time. And then councils come and go, new council members come on that were involved in that project. I knew i.t directors come on that.

00;33;58;21 - 00;34;26;04
Speaker 3
well why is a ikigai guy reporting to the police commander. He belongs to me. New mayor comes in and I lost that position. I'm not forward as hard as I could and and it really negatively impacted we were able to do and the sustainability so you've heard me say many, many times I'm all about building relationships. So it was getting to know the city director, getting to know the city staff, getting them to commit to having one person in the police department's i.t.

00;34;26;04 - 00;34;48;12
Speaker 3
Meetings every week who understood what was happening at the police department and could navigate for some of those things about, you know, you want to install new mobile fingerprint readers, but we need to have a secure connection to the state, transmit that data and we don't have the right router or the right network configuration and we need to buy this piece of hardware and it's expensive and it's budget cycle.

00;34;48;12 - 00;35;06;19
Speaker 3
So having somebody that can talk to us through those things so that we can understand what the infrastructure issues really are, what we need to do to make that happen. But it's also a good place for us to advocate and say, Man, this is really a critical piece of technology. And we've made out for two years, We need to move it up.

00;35;06;21 - 00;35;28;19
Speaker 3
Here's why, here's why it's so critical for us. So it's a two way give and take conversation and relationship between us and then it's really good communication with whoever is going to champion these projects for you at the council level. So there's tough times where you're going to run a roadblock and it is going to say, Look, we can't get to that.

00;35;28;19 - 00;35;53;22
Speaker 3
We've got other things that are too, too important. Your projects are going to stall. And if it's really an important project and you think it's valuable to move it ahead of whatever else it is saying is a priority, getting your chief or someone who can go to that director, plead your case and then go to council. If that doesn't work and say, Here's what I need, here's why it's not happening, can you help me get some movement office.

00;35;53;24 - 00;35;54;06
Speaker 2
Like with.

00;35;54;10 - 00;36;04;11
Speaker 3
It's always, yeah, that's always a last resort. Because again, I'm all about the relationships and I don't want to burn them. But if it's a do or die, you got to have somebody that's willing to champion the project for you.

00;36;04;14 - 00;36;29;28
Speaker 2
Well, and it, it comes down to getting someone else to understand what how the pieces fit right in, in our work. That's what we've seen. Where we come in most often is just translation. You're saying the same exact thing and you're going to have you're on the same page, but you're in a fight because you're using different words that the other person doesn't understand.

00;36;30;01 - 00;36;46;04
Speaker 2
And a lot of this is conflict resolution and communication and making sure that everyone understands the other person now, but that that's great. I know you have other things to talk about, but what have we not covered?

00;36;46;04 - 00;37;12;17
Speaker 3
Like, you know, I think one of the important things to talk about is ongoing maintenance contracts. I've seen this before, and I can give you an example. They tend to creep. They're usually pretty good when you initially sign with a technology vendor, you know what you're getting. You know what the expectations are. And then, you know, three or five years later you're ill and they send you a new contract and then transitioning.

00;37;12;17 - 00;37;46;11
Speaker 3
So get read real well and the vendor will start changing terms in there that you didn't realize. And I'll give you an example. When I was at my agency, I we had, like you said, this license plate reader system was all over the main thoroughfares in the town. It was ours. It worked really well. It was major vendor that everybody does business with and they had a lawful presence and the maintenance contract said that if anything went wrong, they sent a local technician out and they got up in a bucket truck and they pulled the hardware out of the out of the traffic poles.

00;37;46;18 - 00;38;04;05
Speaker 3
They they fixed it. They replaced it. They came back out, reinstalled it. They made sure it was working right. It was it was really set. It forget it for us. And if there was a problem, the vendor took care of it and I was just having lunch with some of my old staff recently and they were expressing frustration over the license plate reader system.

00;38;04;05 - 00;38;24;27
Speaker 3
And I said, Why don't you just call the vendor? And they said, Yeah, that's the vendors changed the contract terms and we didn't realize it. The vendor started losing business in the area. They don't have as much of a presence anymore, so they don't have technicians, anyone stand by to do that. And one of my old staff is telling me, for reader, that doesn't work.

00;38;24;27 - 00;38;44;12
Speaker 3
And I call them for maintenance. And they say, Yeah, we can't do anything. We need the serial number to actually ping it to see what's going on. This is what ping it says. Well, when we installed it, we didn't write down the serial numbers and where we installed them. So you need to go out there and get in a bucket truck and open it up and get the serial number and the polish back and ping it.

00;38;44;12 - 00;38;58;00
Speaker 3
And then if it doesn't work, you need to get the bucket truck and you need to uninstall it, send it back to us and then we'll get it fixed. We can send it back. When you get back to the bucket shop, reinstall it and by the way, can you afford to show them number the new unit That wouldn't do that?

00;38;58;03 - 00;39;13;23
Speaker 3
And I shook my head. This is crazy. Why doesn't somebody call them and say we're not an inmate again until somebody gets out here and fixes that problem? Yeah, that's a creep. They didn't realize that the terms change because they're not reading through the entire minutes. They just assume, it's just the same standard contract we get every year.

00;39;14;00 - 00;39;17;23
Speaker 3
And they and if you sign those things and send them off, you don't know what you're getting.

00;39;17;25 - 00;39;47;20
Speaker 2
Yeah, that's a great point. And you know that that's even more critical within the cesspool releasing it because the threat of the vendor pulling the plug on your system is always present. If you don't, if you don't pay or don't, don't make the monthly payment or what have you. But at the same time, if they're not delivering on their promise of service like you described, is their recourse.

00;39;47;20 - 00;40;18;20
Speaker 2
We did we did a live last week with with a lawyer that specializes in dealing with vendors and contract breaches and negotiation. So that's a cool, cool one to go watch. If I think I'm out of out of topics or questions for now, Mike, but I know that's not forever. So I think I think we'll will reconvene on another topic at some other time unless you have other things to bring up.

00;40;18;20 - 00;40;25;13
Speaker 2
I know you're you're the one that prepares pretty heavily for anything new.

00;40;25;16 - 00;40;50;08
Speaker 3
I do. We just scratched the surface of things that we should be considering to to maintain these implementations over the long term. Yeah, we didn't talk about doing a due diligence on vendors. When you write your, you know, writing our piece, but it's a whole nother topic. And when you get vendors that are submitting, you need to do your due diligence, You need to be going and doing site visits.

00;40;50;15 - 00;41;12;23
Speaker 3
I cannot stress enough we get clients that we talk to that say, you know, I'm just going to buy a for profit of contract. If it's good enough for X, Y, Z agency, it's good enough for me and a lot of times that's that's not true. We need to make sure that the vendor has done a project of your scope for agency of your size.

00;41;12;25 - 00;41;46;15
Speaker 3
We want to go out and talk to these people. Just because they've got a cooperative contract doesn't mean that they made a successful implementation. They may have finally got to implement it, but there might have been a lot of pain. And you talk to that agency and they might say, I wouldn't do this vendor again, or we have sees that have corporate contracts that got it implemented, but halfway into the contract it fails, the software vendor can't maintain it, the system crashes and we want to keep people away from those things whenever possible, reach out and do reference checks if possible.

00;41;46;15 - 00;42;09;22
Speaker 3
And I know it's hard with staffing levels these days, but despite that, it was agencies that have had it. And I tell them not to send one person when we would go out and do site visits, my criminalists would go and sit with their criminal and they dispatched supervisor with their dispatch ship and we would put people next to people in those positions because I'm not going to know the right questions to ask the supervisor.

00;42;09;25 - 00;42;26;21
Speaker 3
I might know some, but I'm not going to get into the detail. My supervisor, she's going to ask all the right details and she's going to come out of that saying, yeah, this is the right system for us or this is not going to work for us. So I would take multiple people to the site visits and I get agencies that kind of go out.

00;42;26;23 - 00;42;41;18
Speaker 3
I said, Look, you're talking about spending millions of dollars and years of your agency's time in a vendor relationship and a couple of days and a couple of thousand bucks to send people out there to make sure that it's the right relationship, you want it there.

00;42;41;21 - 00;43;16;22
Speaker 2
And that's a great point. And then we're doing that for several clients. You and I are meeting tomorrow at a at a site visit. So looking forward to that. In the context of that, as we're helping another a pretty large PD select a new RMS and set up a real time information center, Crime Information Center. So we're going to see one that is already in place so we can form our recommendations and design for our client here.

00;43;16;25 - 00;43;32;29
Speaker 2
So Mike, thanks for joining me today. I will see you tomorrow. But again, it's it's always a pleasure and it's always something, you know, when I when I talk to you learn something new every day so

00;43;33;01 - 00;43;34;04
Speaker 3
Thank you AV appreciate it.

00;43;34;06 - 00;43;37;00
Speaker 2
Yeah, alright take care.

00;43;37;02 - 00;44;01;01
Speaker 1
That's a wrap on today's episode of Untangled for more exciting insights, Remember, you can find a Vero on YouTube at a Vero Advisors and other social media platforms and don't miss out on our weekly newsletter on LinkedIn, where we delve even deeper into digital transformation. Interested in a career day. Very simply, visit our career center on our website to see how you can join our team.

00;44;01;04 - 00;44;09;03
Speaker 1
Thank you for joining us on Untangled your reliable source for understanding the intricate crossroads of technology and local governance. Until next time.