A Chance to see Toys
While at a recent communications exercise one of the leaders in Public Safety for the region was welcoming us to the event and to the city. He made a comment that jumped out at me and it has been troubling me since. As he was thanking us for being there he stated that this was a “Chance to see Toys”. This concerned me because this person is a Regional Director of a large public safety organization and he considered the millions of dollars spent on the communications equipment gathered at the exercise as “Toys”. This was very convicting to me that we in the public safety communications field have not educated our Leaders enough that they still consider mobile command posts, gateways, satellite communications, and all of the other equipment that was gathered as “Toys”. This is a huge issue that we in the field of public safety communications need to face. We need to start at home in our own departments and get the word out of the importance of communications tools in every day response. During the past five years I have been fighting this image here regionally that advanced communications equipment are ”Toys”. When we go to our Administrators and Elected Officials we think that we have to explain the in depth technical advantages of the equipment that we have determined would be a great tool for the public safety officers we are providing a service for. I think that this Director was well meaning in his comments but it showed that he did not have a clear understanding to what these tools bring to public safety.
We have to train ourselves to be able to discuss these advanced systems in “Plain Language”. We learn in Incident Command courses that 10 codes differ from one department to the other. For first responders to be able to communicate from different departments they must use “Plain Language”. We as the leaders in public safety communications must learn to speak “Plain Language” to the non-technical Administrators and Elected Officials that we interface with to receive the funding and support for the new tools needed. We have before us the future of Public safety communications with the National Broadband Plan just announced and the 2016, 700 MHz Narrowbanding mandate. We must communicate the uses of these systems in terms that they can understand and so that they can defend their decisions to the voters. We have to stop thinking that just because we understand all of the acronyms and technical terms they will know what we are talking about. We must educate them to some of the terms and put them into plain language so they can understand the uses and need of them. They must be able to take what we give them and show the public that these systems and equipment are not “Toys” that Public Safety want to play with but they are important tools that are needed to protect and better serve the public.