Public Safety Community Research Articles

Using Implementation Science to Improve Evidence-Based Policing: An Introduction for Researchers and Practitioners

As “the scientific study of methods to promote the systematic uptake of research findings and other evidence-based practices into routine practice,” implementation science (IS) offers the potential to translate effective innovations in policing across agencies and local contexts with fidelity and sustainability in support of a commitment to evidence-based policing (EBP). Despite this potential, and its widespread use in adjacent fields facing similar challenges, implementation science remains almost completely unstudied and unutilized in police settings. To fill these gaps in research and practice, this paper provides an orientation to IS for police researchers and practitioners. It recounts EBP’s historical roots in an evidence-based approach to health care, demonstrates the commonalities that make IS as natural to policing as medicine, and surveys the existing literature on the employment of IS in policing. It adapts a conceptual model of IS to policing, presents two well-developed frameworks, and introduces three types of hybrid implementation/effectiveness trials suitable for use in dynamic police settings. It then provides illustrative cases in policing where the use of IS would be apt, and highlights the importance of the de-implementation of substandard or problematic practices as a key but often overlooked aspect of IS. It concludes by discussing how police practices that fully embrace evidence will nonetheless be guided by contestable values and norms, and how IS provides a way to address this concern. The paper provides research and practice agendas for integrating IS into EBP as police seek to adopt evidence-informed practices that deliver public safety, respect rights, and increase community satisfaction and trust.

2022 WEST COAST SECURITY CONFERENCE WELCOMING REMARKS

On November 21, 2022, Candyce Kelshall, President of the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies Vancouver, delivered her welcome remarks for the 2022 West Coast Security Conference. During her welcoming remarks she stated that the conference was designed for Canada, its military, law enforcement, and the public safety community. Kelshall spoke about the importance of the public safety community considering the emergence of new threat actors and new technologies, changing from state-based responses to identity-based responses when assessing new threats, adapting to changing norms, and collaborating beyond boundaries. Received: 2022-12-27Revised: 2022-12-27

Economic Value of a Weather Decision Support System for Oklahoma Public Safety Officials

The Oklahoma Mesonet’s Public Safety outreach program, OK-First, has provided weather education and data delivery to the public safety community for the past twenty-five years. By delivering high-quality weather data tools, regular classes, and continued follow-up support to its trained members, the OK-First program has empowered more than 1,800 public safety officials. Testimonials from OK-First users indicate that there is an immense value in providing nonscientific audiences with meteorological information and training. OK-First users have saved lives and property using the the program. There has been no quantitative analysis, however, that evaluates the value of the OK-First program. This study fills a gap in providing quantitative analysis for the economic value of the OK-First program. This research used a modified travel cost method to measure the value of information provided by the OK-First program to the users of the program. Results suggest that the average willingness to pay for OK-First is $1,122 per training. The OK-First program in Oklahoma is valued at an estimated $254,000, with a collective surplus of $80,000 per training for OK-First users. This conservative estimate suggests the importance of programs such as the OK-First training, especially for public safety officials in Oklahoma.

Framework for spatial incident-level wildfire risk modelling to residential structures at the wildland urban interface

Understanding wildfire impacts on structures in wildland urban interface (WUI) communities is fundamental for emergency response and mitigation planning to reduce potential social and economic losses. The magnitude of structures loss determines the direct economic costs for re-building, indirect economic losses due to evacuation and disruption of economic activities as well as shelter needs. This paper presents a framework for the development and implementation of incident-level wildfire impact assessment of WUI residential structures including the following successive components: hazard, inventory, exposure, and impact. The hazard model generates spatial and temporal distribution of fire intensity for wildfire event scenarios; the inventory model provides spatial pattern of exposed structures; the exposure model estimates the fire intensity at WUI locations; whereas the impact model evaluates the structures loss by applying newly developed empirical response functions represented as the relationship between fire intensity, distance from forest edge and expected proportion of burned structures. A case study application of the proposed framework is presented for loss assessment of structures in a WUI community of the northern boreal forest of Canada. The proposed framework is particularly useful to the public safety community for conducting what-if scenarios of wildfire impact in support of emergency and mitigation planning.

Hospital Disaster and Emergency Plan in Biological Disasters (HDEP): Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) COVID-19 Pandemic System Model Example

Introduction and Objectives: Man-made disasters can be grouped as technology and violence origin such disasters occur as a result of conscious or unconscious mistakes where chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats are used. It has become significant for hospitals to prepare a plan, which includes information and practical actions, including all situations that require urgency and actions to be taken in emergencies that may occur in workplaces. Coronaviruses are a diverse group of viruses that infect many different animals and can cause mild to severe respiratory infections in humans. Two highly pathogenic coronaviruses of zoonotic origin, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), emerged in humans in 2002 and 2012, respectively. At the end of 2019, the emergence of a new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, in the Chinese city of Wuhan caused an unusual viral pneumonia epidemic. In this study, hospital emergency management plan is examined to the currently effective pandemic element of COVID-19 disease. Methods: It reviews the current situation and recommended actions to improve the preparedness of hospitals in five critical hospital roles during disasters: executing planning and coordination, maintaining disaster capacity, training and disaster drills with the broader health and public safety communities, protection hospital and staff, and surveillance as showing. In this context, coranavirus (SARS-CoV-2) COVID-19 hospital disaster emergency plan system model has been tried to be created. While creating the system method, it proposes a model of how the primary diagnosis and intermediate treatments will be handled in the risk method for the emergency room cases and the clinic, by handling confirmed and suspected cases through both the healthcare personnel and the medical supply system. Results and Conclusions: As a result, the hospital emergency management plan can ease the emergency department workload, protect healthcare personnel, and control cross infection during the COVID-19 outbreak. Each hospital needs to create an emergency plan suitable for its own conditions. Hospitals can take interim measures, including online consultation, zoning, and epidemic priority to relieve pressure on clinical trials, reduce cross-infection, and strengthen protection of high-risk personnel.

“A Great Investment in Our Communities”: Strengthening Nunavut’s Whole-of-Society Search and Rescue Capabilities

Community-based organizations along with territorial, provincial, and federal agencies are responsible for search and rescue (SAR) in the Canadian Arctic. In delivering response capabilities at all hours of the day and for 365 days a year, the community-based organizations face a wide array of challenges. Using the data collected through the Kitikmeot Search and Rescue Project and the Kitikmeot Roundtable on SAR, coupled with academic and non-government organization literature, this article explores the major challenges facing community SAR organizations in Nunavut and builds a case for how targeted investment can best bolster community-based capabilities. We suggest novel, practical, and holistic solutions that have been proposed by or co-devised with community partners, are rooted in the unique context of Nunavut’s communities, and are reflective of a community resilience-building approach. One set of recommendations involves strengthening current programming, including the expansion of Nunavut Emergency Management’s inReach program, continued support for the enlargement of the CCGA, streamlining the process to activate Canadian Ranger patrols, and encouraging greater cooperation in the provision of training by federal and territorial agencies. We also propose new approaches, including a whole-of-society preventative SAR program centred on educational and youth programming, the adoption of a SAR equipment usage rate model, and the launch of a Community Public Safety Officer program in Nunavut. Finally, to justify greater investment at the community level, we argue that policymakers must change how they conceptualize community-based SAR capabilities in Nunavut. An effective SAR system is about more than the ability to respond to emergency events. It is a critical enabler to broader objectives and goals prioritized in the Arctic and Northern Policy Framework and other federal, territorial, and Inuit strategies.

Listening to Stakeholders: Initiating Research on Subseasonal-to-Seasonal Heavy Precipitation Events in the Contiguous United States by First Understanding What Stakeholders Need

AbstractHeavy precipitation events and their associated flooding can have major impacts on communities and stakeholders. There is a lack of knowledge, however, about how stakeholders make decisions at the subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) time scales (i.e., 2 weeks to 3 months). To understand how decisions are made and S2S predictions are or can be used, the project team for “Prediction of Rainfall Extremes at Subseasonal to Seasonal Periods” (PRES2iP) conducted a 2-day workshop in Norman, Oklahoma, during July 2018. The workshop engaged 21 professionals from environmental management and public safety communities across the contiguous United States in activities to understand their needs for S2S predictions of potential extended heavy precipitation events. Discussions and role-playing activities aimed to identify how workshop participants manage uncertainty and define extreme precipitation, the time scales over which they make key decisions, and the types of products they use currently. This collaboration with stakeholders has been an integral part of PRES2iP research and has aimed to foster actionable science. The PRES2iP team is using the information produced from this workshop to inform the development of predictive models for extended heavy precipitation events and to collaboratively design new forecast products with our stakeholders, empowering them to make more-informed decisions about potential extreme precipitation events.

5G for the Support of Public Safety Services

Next-generation mobile technologies are the enablers for meeting the variable specific requirements of the public safety (PS) community. In particular, due to the development of commercially deployed 5G networks, PS providers look for ways to implement related solutions upon such infrastructures, potentially in a shared use with existing commercial networks. In particular, LTE and 5G NR networks are rapidly gaining recognition as an all-inclusive critical communications platform for the delivery of both mission and business critical applications. Within this scope, we take into account the innovative architectural approach that has been proposed by the 5G ESSENCE project, addressing the paradigms of edge computing and small cell as-a-service that has been realised via a cloud-enabled small cell infrastructure leveraging multi-access technologies in 5G, where we propose a dedicated PS use case, able to offer a mission critical push-to-talk service as well as a Chat and Localisation service. Each one of these services is associated to a dedicated network slice within the scope of the corresponding fundamental 5G ESSENCE architecture and both services are provided via suitable VNFs, thus offering great flexibility to serve PS needs together. We further discuss the overall scenario deployment with the related technical enablers and the proposed functionalities, per case. The corresponding end-to-end slicing makes possible to allocate both radio and cloud resources to the involved critical actors, in an automated and elastic way.

Hybrid Modeling for Design of a Novel Bridge Pier Collar for Reducing Scour

Bridge pier scour poses major concerns for public safety and riverine communities because of its ability to undermine pier foundations. A new collar design is introduced as an improvement on the existing Flat Plate Collar (FPC). Uniquely, the three-dimensional collar is specifically designed to contain the horseshoe vortex and guide it safely downstream, while protecting the riverbed around the pier base from the passing accelerated flow. Large shear stresses are thereby prevented from contacting the riverbed, and thus scour is considerably reduced. The collar design was achieved in an iterative hybrid manner through the use of OpenFOAM (CFD) software and by employing experimental tests. Collar designs were tested numerically and adjusted until an improved shape was reached. Then, a physical model of the new collar and an FPC were constructed and tested experimentally. The collar is demonstrated to reduce scour, more than that of an FPC; however further revisions are required for it to be an effective scour solution.

Community Public Safety Evaluation System Based on Location Information Service Architecture

The establishment of communities is for the better operation and management of cities, and community safety has gradually become a topic of increasing concern. It is not only an important part of the community public safety system, but also the foundation of social and economic development. With the improvement of the overall economic level of society, wireless network coverage has been greatly improved, smart devices have also been rapidly developed and popularized, and location-based information service systems have gradually entered the field of community public safety. At present, my country still lacks experience in community safety management. At the same time, there is no complete set of standards and evaluation system for the public safety evaluation system of urban communities. However, community public safety involves people’s livelihood issues and the stability and development of the city. Therefore, it is urgent to build a community public safety evaluation system based on the location information service architecture. Based on the safety community research and location service system, this paper uses the combination of theory and practice, quantitative and qualitative methods, and tentatively explored and constructed a community public safety evaluation system based on the location information service architecture. This article integrates location information service technology into the community public safety evaluation system, selects three indicator factors, investigates a more comprehensive evaluation subject, and combines the evaluation subject’s qualitative evaluation of community public safety with quantitative evaluation through fuzzy comprehensive evaluation. This paper conducts an empirical analysis of a certain community and finds that its public safety evaluation score is 62.6232 points, which is in the “general” ranks, and it needs to be combined with the location information service system to improve the community safety issues. This study has guiding significance for ensuring community public safety and has theoretical and practical significance for community construction and development.

Uses of Telehealth to Support Identification and Treatment of Health Disorders in the Criminal Justice System

Telehealth, the interactive, electronic exchange of information for diagnosis, treatment, support, or care management, is a critical component of many systems of care.1 The variety of telehealth uses, technologies, and approaches, when implemented successfully, can improve access to care and overcome typical geographic and workforce barriers.1 The opioid epidemic and recent social distancing requirements due to coronavirus disease (COVID-19) have prompted public safety, behavioral health, and other community partners to explore how telehealth can be used for identification and treatment of disorders in the criminal justice system. Telehealth offers an innovative strategy for intervention and treatment within the criminal justice system, which is greatly needed given the prevalence of justice-involved populations affected by opioid-use disorder. For one, it is costly to provide treatment and care to people who are incarcerated, and telehealth can help reduce that cost.2 Using telehealth to connect these people to providers can also help avoid resource-heavy and potentially dangerous transfers to care settings. In addition, a telehealth strategy can minimize the burden associated with recruiting and retaining healthcare providers on site, particularly behavioral health providers, who are often in short supply. Offering options virtually is one way to ameliorate organizational challenges. Services that can be provided via telehealth include inpatient and outpatient medical services, behavioral health, physical and occupational therapy, disaster management, health education,1 and coordination of care support for inmates, providers, and officials. Telehealth can also be used to facilitate release of inmates by connecting people who are in prison or jail with community-based services before release.

Drink, but don't drive? The alcohol industry's involvement in global road safety.

Drink-driving is a major cause of global road traffic fatalities, yet few countries have laws that meet international best practices. One possible reason is the alcohol industry’s opposition to meaningful policies that are perceived to directly threaten sales. Our primary objectives are to document alcohol industry involvement in global road safety policies and programmes and to critically evaluate the responses of public health and road safety communities to this involvement. Under the guidance of the Policy Dystopia Model, we used a mixed methods approach in which data were gathered from expert interviews and a mapping review of 11 databases, 5 watchdog websites and 7 alcohol industry-sponsored initiatives. Triangulation was used to identify points of convergence among data sources. A total of 20 expert interviews and 94 documents were analysed. Our study showed that the alcohol industry acknowledges that drink-driving is an issue but argues for solutions that would limit impact on sales, akin to the message ‘drink—but do not drive’. Industry actors have been involved in road safety through: (1) coalition coupling and decoupling, (2) information production and management, (3) direct involvement in policymaking and (4) implementation of interventions. Our study also shed light on the lack of cohesion within and among the public health and road safety communities, particularly with regard to the topics of receiving funding from and partnering with the alcohol industry. These results were subsequently used to adapt the Policy Dystopia Model as a conceptual framework that illustrates the ways in which the alcohol industry has been involved in global road safety. Several implications can be drawn from this study, including the urgent need to increase awareness about the involvement of the alcohol industry in road safety and to build a cohesive transnational alcohol control advocacy alliance to curb injuries and deaths related to drink-driving.

Managing Close Contacts of COVID-19 Confirmed Cases in Metropolitan Areas in China.

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak has rapidly spread across the world. As medical systems continue to develop vaccines and treatments, it is crucial for the public health community to establish nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) that can effectively mitigate the rate of SARS-Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) spread across highly populated residential areas, especially among individuals who have close contact with confirmed cases. A community-driven preparedness strategy has been implemented in metropolitan areas in China. The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CCDC) has required that all COVID-19 confirmed cases be recorded and documented in a national notifiable disease surveillance system (NDSS). After receiving reports of newly confirmed cases, an epidemiological services team at the CCDC or trained medical professionals at local clinical facilities start a case-contact investigation. A task force performs home visits to infected individuals. Persons under investigation (PUIs) can stay in designated quarantine facilities for 14 days or in special circumstances can be quarantined at home. This community-based approach involved all stakeholders including local public health departments, public safety authorities, neighborhood councils, and community health centers.

Flood damage calculations via a RESTful API

In Canada and across the globe, flooding has significantly increased in recent decades. Knowledge of the flood hazard alone (extent and frequency) does not provide enough information to the public safety community to make informed decisions regarding potential social and economic losses. While many programs have been developed for flood risk assessment, they require experienced personnel to prepare the data inputs, run and analyse the model outputs. As such, alternative, easy-to-use tools for risk assessment are appealing. We present in this paper a RESTful Application Program Interface (API) for building damage estimation. This API is a web-service which allows access to buildings damage calculations outside of a risk assessment program. It is designed to provide a point of entry for developers to programmatically access the underlying calculation tools to query, calculate and extract damage data directly into a users own software, tools or decision support systems. To validate the accuracy of results the damage data is compared to results from existing software for two communities in Eastern Canada. To illustrate the ease of use of the API, a Python script has been written which reads in a file containing the building information and pre-determined flood depths. This script builds the request for the API and saves the results: damage and exposure.

ER2-Earthquake: Interactive web-application for urban seismic risk assessment

An interactive user-friendly web-based application for urban seismic risk assessment referred to as rapid risk evaluator (ER2) is presented. It combines three major input components: seismic hazard, exposed buildings and respective vulnerabilities. Intended primarily for application by the larger public-safety community, ER2 intuitively guides non-expert users with step-by-step prompts and on-screen instructions through otherwise complex risk scenarios. Open-source software is used to offer the application free of all financial cost for users. The analyses are based on parameters of the well-known FEMA's Hazus method. To accelerate the computation and rapidly obtain estimates of the negative impacts, ER2 employs pre-populated inventory and vulnerability databases. The standard displacement-based structural fragility curves and iterative nonlinear static analyses are replaced with fragility curves determined as direct functions of the shaking intensity. Comparison of damage probability results, economic and social losses concur with Hazus estimates for individual buildings and for aggregated inventory at urban scale. An example of seismic risk assessment for Quebec City, Canada, is shown to illustrate the effectiveness of ER2.

The Evolution and Impact of a Meteorological Outreach Program for Public Safety Officials: An Update on the Oklahoma Mesonet’s OK-First Program

AbstractSince 1997, the Oklahoma Mesonet (the state’s automated mesoscale weather station network) has served a community of more than 1,400 public safety officials (emergency managers, fire officials, law enforcement, etc.) across Oklahoma through a weather data and training program called Oklahoma’s First-Response Information Resource System using Telecommunications (OK-First). OK-First provides free weather and radar data interpretation classes to eligible public safety officials and, following successful completion of training, password-protected access to weather data tools including a website and software. The objective of OK-First when it began was to fill significant gaps in weather product training and data access for Oklahoma’s public safety community. Though the core mission remains the same 20 years later, many aspects of OK-First have evolved over time, including participant membership, training curriculum, formats of training, training requirements, website and software technology, and program feedback. The purpose of this paper is to provide an update on the Mesonet’s OK-First program, with a particular focus on training, tools, and the impact it has had on the public safety community.

Public Safety Communication User Needs: Voices of First Responders

The public safety community is transitioning from land mobile radios to a communications technology ecosystem including a variety of broadband data sharing platforms. Successful deployment and adoption of new communications technology relies on efficient and effective user interfaces based on understanding first responder needs, requirements, and contexts of use; human factors research is needed to examine these factors. As such, this paper presents initial qualitative research results via semi-structured interviews with 133 first responders across the U.S. While there are similarities across disciplines, results show there is no easy “one size fits all” communications technology solution. To facilitate trust in new communications technology, solutions must be dependable, easy to use for first responders, and meet their communication needs through the application of user-centered design principles. During this shift in public safety communications technology, the time is now to leverage existing human factors expertise to influence emerging technology for public safety.

Earthquake Magnitude and Shaking Intensity Dependent Fragility Functions for Rapid Risk Assessment of Buildings

An integrated web application, referred to as ER2 for rapid risk evaluator, is under development for a user-friendly seismic risk assessment by the non-expert public safety community. The assessment of likely negative consequences is based on pre-populated databases of seismic, building inventory and vulnerability parameters. To further accelerate the computation for near real-time analyses, implicit building fragility curves were developed as functions of the magnitude and the intensity of the seismic shaking defined with a single intensity measure, input spectral acceleration at 1.0 s implicitly considering the epicentral distance and local soil conditions. Damage probabilities were compared with those obtained with the standard fragility functions explicitly considering epicentral distances and local site classes in addition to the earthquake magnitudes and respective intensity of the seismic shaking. Different seismic scenarios were considered first for 53 building classes common in Eastern Canada, and then a reduced number of 24 combined building classes was proposed. Comparison of results indicate that the damage predictions with implicit fragility functions for short (M ≤ 5.5) and medium strong motion duration (5.5 < M ≤ 7.5) show low variation with distance and soil class, with average error of less than 3.6%.

ComProSe: Shaping Future Public Safety Communities with ProSe-Based UAVs

3GPP ProSe supports direct discovery and communications between UE localized in proximity to each other. However, the existing 3GPP ProSe has limited support for user-friendly rich media content exchange between different public safety groups. This article proposes ComProSe, an innovative ProSe-enhanced multimedia communication framework for public safety services. By employing UAV as relays, ComProSe provides direct discovery and QoS-aware communications between public safety UEs from different organizations. Additionally, user-friendly interaction between public safety UEs is offered. ComProSe is designed in alignment with the emerging 3GPP 5G technologies and is compatible with both operator networks and mobile consumer electronics. The article also presents real-life testing illustrating the cooperation between UAV and public safety users availing from a public safety service in the context of ComProSe.

Overview of LTE Isolated E-UTRAN Operation for Public Safety

In response to the growing demand in the public safety community for broadband communication systems, LTE is currently being adopted as the base technology for next generation public safety networks. In parallel, notable efforts are being made by the 3GPP to enhance the LTE standard in order to offer public safety oriented services. In the recent Release 13, the Isolated E-UTRAN Operation for Public Safety (IOPS) concept was introduced. IOPS aims at maintaining a level of communication between public safety users, offering them local mission-critical services even when the backhaul connectivity to the core network is not fully functional. Isolated operation is usually needed in mission-critical situations, when the infrastructure is damaged or completely destroyed, and in out of coverage areas. In this article, we present a detailed technical overview of the IOPS specifications, and then identify several research prospects and development perspectives opened up by IOPS, being a relatively novel concept in the mobile networks field.