NICE News Special Edition - Volume 2, Issue 7

	JIM PARK UPDATE NICE, MOTOROLA COLLABORATE JEFFERSON COUNTY'S MICHAEL LEE TELECOMMUNICATOR OF THE YEAR: KATHY BOBOT INSIGHT 2006: LAST CHANCE TO REGISTER CORYELL COUNTY SHERIFF APCO AWARD WINNERS NICE IN THE NEWS PICTURE YOUR PSAP IN NICE NEWS PUBLIC SAFETY RESOURCE CENTER NICE EVENTS




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JEFFERSON COUNTY'S MICHAEL LEE: HOW ONE MAN'S CALLING IS BENEFITING AN ENTIRE COUNTY

In his 33 years in public safety, Jefferson County's Michael Lee has done it all. Lee began his career as many in public safety do: on the beat, as a patrol deputy with the Jefferson County (Alabama) Sheriff's Office. But it wasn't until 1994 that Lee, a graduate of the FBI National Academy at Quantico, found his true calling - communications. "I really enjoyed working in communications, so when I was able as a lieutenant to go back into the 9-1-1 center and actually manage the center, I knew I'd found my niche."

Nowadays, as chief of communications for Jefferson County, Lee is still pursuing his passion for communications, but in a much larger way. He oversees the County's massive radio communications network and manages the County's 9-1-1 budget.

One of Lee's proudest accomplishments in his role as communications chief is the recently completed installation of a County-wide Motorola SmartZone® multi-site radio network. Lee, who knows a thing or two about trunked radio (he's the newly elected President of the Motorola Trunked Radio User Group, also known as MTUG) explained why the three-year long project was so important: "We had a lot of public safety agencies that wanted to join the radio network, so we needed to increase our coverage for the County. The only way we could accomplish this, especially in the sparse areas of the County, was to go to SmartZone."

Lee says that a number of County agencies, many of whom would not have had the funding to implement this technology on their own, lined up to join the shared radio network. It was a cost-effective proposition - participating agencies could leverage the County's radio network infrastructure. The only requirement was a minimal outlay to purchase subscriber equipment and radios, as needed.

But there was one even bigger motivation for the County to undertake the overhaul. "Another driving factor was interoperability," said Lee. "In the past, if there was a car chase or multi-jurisdictional incident where agencies needed to work together, it was very difficult."

Since implementing the SmartZone system, Lee has seen an improvement. "We've already had a lot of interoperability reports coming in from the police departments and the Sheriff's Office, where agencies have been able to communicate together more effectively across jurisdictions," he said. Lee cites as examples multi-jurisdictional incidents involving car chases, warrants and drug task forces.

Alabama also sees its share of catastrophic weather events. "We get tornadoes from time to time," said Lee. "We've even had a couple of hurricanes come up through Alabama that have wreaked havoc in our area." Lee affirms that cross-agency communications are critical in these potentially disastrous scenarios too.

Currently there are close to three dozen organizations within Jefferson County that operate on the SmartZone network. "We have a lot of municipalities on the system," noted Lee. Users include myriad police departments, fire departments, transit systems, utilities and airport authorities.

The march of municipalities onto the radio network continues unabated, with the police departments of Gardendale and Trussville being the latest to sign on. Jefferson County and Birmingham are the most populous County and City in Alabama. Not coincidently, they are also the largest users on the network.

All of the County-wide radio communications for the more than 30 agencies - from over 5,000 radios - are captured on a shared NiceLog® recording system that the County purchased through Motorola. The new system, which was installed about a month ago and is now fully operational, also records the dispatch communications for the Communications Bureau of the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office.

"When this technology was presented to us - where we could record trunking and search by talkgroups and users - it really got our attention," said Lee.

But aside from the state-of-the-art technology, Lee had another rationale for selecting NICE. At about the same time, the City of Birmingham had also decided to standardize on NICE for capturing its 9-1-1 communications. "We wanted to keep the whole system compatible so we could share it," said Lee. "We upgraded to NICE so that it would all work together."

Since Birmingham is on Jefferson County's shared radio network, the City leverages the County's NICE system to capture its radio interactions. But it employs a separate NICE system, which it purchased at its own expense, to record its fire and police dispatch communications. All of County-wide radio communications, and the dispatch communications for the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office and the City of Birmingham Police and Fire departments, are stored on a single shared RAID storage device purchased by the City of Birmingham. The NICE capture systems and sites are networked together. "It's really a great example of how our two governments worked together to share resources," said Lee.

Lee also explained that Jefferson County selected NICE because, in his words, "It was the latest technology available."

Over the years, the County had gone through numerous gyrations of recording solutions, employing a reel-to-reel tape device, then a digital audio tape-based solution from Dictaphone. Using the Dictaphone system, the County had been limited to recording a select number of talkgroups. "We were capturing our talkgroups off the console," said Lee. "We weren't recording in a trunking mode. Consequently, there were a lot of channels on our radio system that weren't being recorded. We just didn't have the capacity or the technology to do that."

In contrast, the County's new NICE solution captures all of the radio transmissions and talkgroups on the County-wide Motorola SmartZone system. The audio is recorded directly from the Motorola Digital Interface Units (DIUs) and the trunked radio data - essential for piecing transmissions together on replay - is captured by tapping into the data stream of the Motorola SmartZone system's network control channel.

Capturing trunked radio data (unit IDs, talkgroup IDs, etc.) gives the County more ways to query the system for recorded radio transmissions, should the County need to retrieve recordings for investigations or court cases. "On the radio side, we can search by a unit ID, if we're looking for conversations for a particular unit," said Lee. "We can also search for particular talkgroups. It's just very versatile."

The NICE solution also captures an ANI (phone number) and ALI (address) for each 9-1-1 call coming into the Jefferson County comm center, and the caller ID for those calls that come in on the 7-digit emergency number line. Investigators and detectives can use that information to pinpoint captured calls.

Lee was quick to tout another distinct feature of his NICE solution - its Scenario Replay^TM software. The software offers a visual view of incidents as they unfold. All of the radio and phone communications relating to an incident appear in a graphical timeline, along with additional visual cues - such as the ANI or ALI information or icons relating a radio event (for example, when different talkgroups merged to form a supergroup).

"With Scenario Replay, we can find all of the conversations that came over a talkgroup and put them together along with any phone calls relating to the incident," said Lee. "This is stuff that we were not able to do before."

Because the system captures County-wide radio communications, it's also possible to reconstruct incidents that necessitated a multi-jurisdictional response. And, Lee says, the NICE system has already been put to work in a few of those instances. "There have been a few cases where we've had to pull recordings for court, for chases that resulted in an arrest," he said.

The NICE solution has also made it easier for investigators, detectives and supervisors to access recordings, because all of the calls are now stored on-line on RAID, instead of on tapes. "In the past, if you needed a recording, you had to go to the radio room and get the supervisor to pull a tape. Now, internal affairs, the detective bureau, and patrol supervisors can all pull their own recordings right from their offices, over the network. It has been a real time saver and has freed up our supervisor to do more supervising in the 9-1-1 center, instead of pulling tapes for everyone."

Currently, users from both Jefferson County and the City of Birmingham are set up to access recordings over the network. Lee says that this option has been offered to other users on the radio network and many are considering it. "That capability is available to all of the agencies if they want to go that route," said Lee.