Public Safety Organizations Research Articles

Toward Tweet-Mining Framework for Extracting Terrorist Attack-Related Information and Reporting

The widespread popularity of social networking is leading to the adoption of Twitter as an information dissemination tool. Existing research has shown that information dissemination over Twitter has a much broader reach than traditional media and can be used for effective post-incident measures. People use informal language on Twitter, including acronyms, misspelled words, synonyms, transliteration, and ambiguous terms. This makes incident-related information extraction a non-trivial task. However, this information can be valuable for public safety organizations that need to respond in an emergency. This paper proposes an early event-related information extraction and reporting framework that monitors Twitter streams synthesizes event-specific information, e.g., a terrorist attack, and alerts law enforcement, emergency services, and media outlets. Specifically, the proposed framework, Tweet-to-Act (T2A), employs word embedding to transform tweets into a vector space model and then utilizes the Word Mover’s Distance (WMD) to cluster tweets for the identification of incidents. To extract reliable and valuable information from a large dataset of short and informal tweets, the proposed framework employs sequence labeling with bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory based Recurrent Neural Networks ( bLSTM-RNN ). Extensive experimental results suggest that our proposed framework, T2A, outperforms other state-of-the-art methods that use vector space modeling and distance calculation techniques, e.g., Euclidean and Cosine distance. T2A achieves an accuracy of 96% and an F1-score of 86.2% on real-life datasets.

Inter-organisational communication and situational awareness in an emergency operation centre during major incidents

Sharing information between different public safety organisations plays a vital role during major incidents. Common situational awareness among the actors is a key element in achieving successful e...

Should public safety shift workers be allowed to nap while on duty?

Fatigue and sleep deficiency among public safety personnel are threats to wellness, public and personal safety, and workforce retention. Napping strategies may reduce work‐related fatigue, improve safety and health, yet in some public safety organizations it is discouraged or prohibited. Our aim with this commentary is to define intra‐shift napping, summarize arguments for and against it, and to outline potential applications of this important fatigue mitigation strategy supported by evidence. We focus our discussion on emergency medical services (EMS); a key component of the public safety system, which is comprised of police, fire, and EMS. The personnel who work in EMS stand to benefit from intra‐shift napping due to frequent use of extended duration shifts, a high prevalence of personnel working multiple jobs, and evidence showing that greater than half of EMS personnel report severe fatigue, poor sleep quality, inadequate inter‐shift recovery, and excessive daytime sleepiness. The benefits of intra‐shift napping include decreased sleepiness and fatigue, improved recovery between shifts, decreased anxiety, and reduced feelings of burnout. Intra‐shift napping also mitigates alterations in clinician blood pressure associated with disturbed sleep and shift work. The negative consequences of napping include negative public perception, acute performance deficits stemming from sleep inertia, and the potential costs associated with reduced performance. While there are valid arguments against intra‐shift napping, we believe that the available scientific evidence favors it as a key component of fatigue mitigation and workplace wellness. We further believe that these arguments extend beyond EMS to all sectors of public safety.

Solar-powered flood early warning system with short message service (SMS) notifications

<span>Flood is one of the most common hazards in Malaysia. Flood effects can be local, or very large, affecting the neighborhood or community and entire river basins. This flood develops slowly; sometimes over a period of days while sometimes develop quickly in just few minutes. With the real time flood information, it will allow public safety organizations and other emergency managers to effectively plan their resource deployment within the limited time of alert. Hence, this project aims to design the solar powered flood alert warning system by using solar energy as the power supply. This system will send message using GSM to the residents to notify them about the flood occurred. In this project, three LEDs were used to indicate the height of the water levels which are safe, alert and danger conditions. Each of the height have different water level that indicates the level of safety for each condition. </span>

Carfentanil Outbreak - Florida, 2016-2017.

Increased prevalence of illicitly manufactured fentanyl and fentanyl analogs has contributed substantially to overdose deaths in the United States (1-3). On October 26, 2015, CDC issued a Health Advisory regarding rapid increases in deaths involving fentanyl. This CDC Health Advisory has been updated twice to address increases in fentanyl and fentanyl analog overdoses and their co-occurrence with nonopioids (4). Deaths involving carfentanil, an analog reportedly 10,000 times more potent than morphine and 100 times more potent than fentanyl, were first reported in Florida, Michigan, and Ohio in 2016 and described in an August 2016 CDC Health Advisory (1,5). Carfentanil is used to rapidly immobilize large animals in veterinary medicine and has no U.S. approved therapeutic use in humans. Carfentanil's street price per dose is likely lower than that of heroin. During 2016 and 2017, an outbreak of carfentanil-involved fatal overdoses in Florida emerged, and the Medical Examiner jurisdiction serving Sarasota, Manatee, and DeSoto counties (the Sarasota area) was the outbreak epicenter. This report describes toxicology profiles, sociodemographic information, and geographic distributions of carfentanil-involved fatal overdoses (carfentanil deaths) in the Sarasota area compared with those in the rest of Florida (i.e., all Florida counties excluding Sarasota area) from January 2016 to December 2017. The Sarasota area accounted for 19.0% of 1,181 statewide carfentanil deaths that occurred during this time and experienced a peak in carfentanil deaths preceding the larger Florida outbreak. The report of a single carfentanil death from August to December 2017 (compared with 73 reported deaths during the same period in 2016) appeared to mark the end of the outbreak in the area. The threat of such rapid, intense fatal overdose outbreaks highlights the need for accelerated reporting, reliable data sharing systems, and novel proactive surveillance to support targeted prevention and response efforts by public health and safety organizations (6).

Student mental health: The ongoing crisis

It is no secret that the country has its hands full dealing with mental health awareness, identification, and treatment — all while facing a lack of resources. Law enforcement and public safety organizations throughout the nation are faced with similar dilemmas in that they all seem to struggle with resources. Lack of personnel, training, effective use of technology, and practical experience are just a few of the challenges we all face.

Analysis of Emergency Medical Response Service in Peshawar through Simulation

EMRS (Emergency Medical Response Service) is the public safety system that is responsible for the initial first aid and transportation of the patient to the hospital. Providing a timely response to any emergency situation is of critical nature and needs to be addressed in the shortest possible time. Decreasing the response to an emergency site and timely pre-hospitalization care location identification and number of emergency response personnel and vehicles are some of the critical elements of EMRS. In this research, a probabilistic model is developed which incorporates the probabilistic response to any emergency situation. The developed model was applied to an actual scenario of the EMRS in the city of Peshawar, Pakistan. The EMRS has 7 locations covering 7 different regions of the city covering more than 1200 square kilometers area. The main purpose of the study is to measure the quality of EMRS on the basis of response time and queue. The study has identified that station 1 and 2 have the highest utilization; 58% each, while station 7 has the lowest utilization at 13.7%. Since the emergency care at the site of incidence is one of the primary responsibilities of the public safety organizations so this study also discusses the average instantaneous utilization of EMRS resources for that region.

The Joint Counterterrorism Awareness Workshop Series (JCTAWS): Integrating disciplines for enhanced capabilities during a complex coordinated attack.

Evolving threats, such as Complex Coordinated Terrorist Attacks (CCTAs) and other High-Threat Active Violence Incidents, require a comprehensive "Whole of Community" approach to enhance readiness within the emergency management mission. Engaging all community stakeholders, inclusive of the private sector, public safety organizations, and the health and healthcare communities, is essential for risk reduction by preventing and limiting consequences from such critical incidents. The Joint Counterterrorism Awareness Workshop Series (JCTAWS) is a unique interdisciplinary table-top exercise sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security/Federal Emergency Management Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and National Counterterrorism Center, and is designed to test plans and capabilities surrounding a CCTA. JCTAWS focuses on response integration between and across disciplines and jurisdictions. The workshop stimulates participant identification of best practices and gaps so that plans can be refined and resources realigned to improve response coordination for CCTAs.

Access Time Analysis of MCPTT Off-Network Mode over LTE

Public safety organizations around the world started migrating toward Long-Term Evolution (LTE) networks to support the increasing needs for video and data. To address the unique voice communication requirements of first responders, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) introduced new capabilities that aim at providing similar functionalities as the traditional Land Mobile Radio (LMR) systems, namely, Direct Mode communication and mission critical push-to-talk (MCPTT). Direct Mode communication, also called Proximity Services (ProSe), allows public safety users to communicate directly with each other regardless of the network status. MCPTT was the first mission critical service, and first application, standardized by 3GPP to provide both on- and off-network voice capability. Assessing the performance of those capabilities is critical to accelerate their deployment and adoption by first responders. In this study, we evaluate the performance of an off-network mode MCPTT device over ProSe by focusing on the access time, a measure of the delay incurred before a user can talk. We develop analytical models for various types of calls and verify the accuracy of the predicted access time using ns-3 simulations. We perform sensitivity analysis to show the validity of the models for various scenarios. Finally, we show how the models can be used to guide parameter configuration for both MCPTT and ProSe to optimize the performance.

Push-to-Talk over LTE Modeling and Performance Evaluation

Public Safety organizations play a vital role in disaster recovery and public protection. First responders rely on their communication systems to perform their mission. Their communication systems are considered mission critical which puts special requirements on their underlying enabling technologies. Nowadays, most of the communication systems used in public safety are narrowband and were mainly developed for voice communication. Push-to-Talk is a multicast (group call) half-duplex type of communication that emergency first responders heavily rely on. When first responders request to speak by pushing the button on their handset, during emergencies, they must be confident that their requests will go through and not blocked. LTE technology has been chosen in many countries, including the US, to be the platform for the next generation public safety communication systems. LTE is a broadband wireless communication technology that public safety communication may benefit from the high data rates LTE technology offers. This paper proposes an analytical model of Push-to-Talk over LTE networks to study their performance by using queueing theory. The model is validated against a discrete event simulation (SimEvents). The study provides some guidelines to improve the Grade of Service (GOS) of Push-to-Talk over LTE systems.

Collaboration of Drone and Internet of Public Safety Things in Smart Cities: An Overview of QoS and Network Performance Optimization

This paper studies the network performance of collaboration between the Internet of public safety things (IoPST) and drones. Drones play a vital role in delivering timely and essential wireless communication services for the recovery of services right after a disaster by increasing surge capacity for the purposes of public safety, exploring areas that are difficult to reach, and providing an area of rapid coverage and connectivity. To provide such critical facilities in the case of disasters and for the purposes of public safety, collaboration between drones and IoPST is able to support public safety requirements such as real-time analytics, real-time monitoring, and enhanced decision-making to help smart cities meet their public safety requirements. Therefore, the deployment of drone-based wireless communication can save people and ecosystems by helping public safety organizations face threats and manage crises in an efficient manner. The contribution of this work lies in improving the level of public safety in smart cities through collaborating between smart wearable devices and drone technology. Thus, the collaboration between drones and IoPST devices establishes a public safety network that shows satisfying results in terms of enhancing efficiency and information accuracy.

MetricsVis: A Visual Analytics System for Evaluating Employee Performance in Public Safety Agencies.

Evaluating employee performance in organizations with varying workloads and tasks is challenging. Specifically, it is important to understand how quantitative measurements of employee achievements relate to supervisor expectations, what the main drivers of good performance are, and how to combine these complex and flexible performance evaluation metrics into an accurate portrayal of organizational performance in order to identify shortcomings and improve overall productivity. To facilitate this process, we summarize common organizational performance analyses into four visual exploration task categories. Additionally, we develop MetricsVis, a visual analytics system composed of multiple coordinated views to support the dynamic evaluation and comparison of individual, team, and organizational performance in public safety organizations. MetricsVis provides four primary visual components to expedite performance evaluation: (1) a priority adjustment view to support direct manipulation on evaluation metrics; (2) a reorderable performance matrix to demonstrate the details of individual employees; (3) a group performance view that highlights aggregate performance and individual contributions for each group; and (4) a projection view illustrating employees with similar specialties to facilitate shift assignments and training. We demonstrate the usability of our framework with two case studies from medium-sized law enforcement agencies and highlight its broader applicability to other domains.

Angels and Anti-Pornography Feminists: A Comparative Analysis of Civilian Public Safety Organizations

Late 1970s New York, rife with fear of crime and low trust in government to keep people safe, was a fertile ground for civilian public safety activism, which channeled people’s anger at the city’s situation into action to change it. The Guardian Angels and Women Against Pornography (WAP) were two of the best-known examples of this trend. Though rarely taken up together, this article places them in dialogue with one another in order to examine how racial, gender, sexual, and economic anxieties influenced the perception and possibilities of anti-violence community organizations at this time. I argue that while the predominately young, male, and nonwhite Angels were seen as belligerent, WAP’s adherence to the state’s social norms of acceptable female activism and sexual reformism facilitated their broader acceptance. The same social hierarchies that colored perceptions of the two organizations also shaped the available sources of partnerships, legitimacy, and funding, incentivizing both groups to undermine the most radically inclusive aspects of their missions in order to secure the resources they needed to continue operating most effectively.

Internet of Things applications in public safety management: a survey

PurposePublic safety issues are highly concerned by the state and public. As an emerging network technology and industrial mode, Internet of Things (IoT) has great application prospect because of its architecture advantages and technical features, and has drawn wide attention from all walks of life. With the development of IoT, especially the putting forward of concept of public safety IoT, IoT has been a certain degree of application in the field of public safety. Because of that, public safety regulatory technology is improved. The paper aims to discuss this issue.Design/methodology/approachBy summarizing scholars’ research results, this paper analyzes the application of IoT in public safety regulation, points out the challenges in application, and then puts forward some suggestions, pointing out IoT development prospects in the area of public safety regulation.FindingsThe application of IoT in the field of public safety from the perspective of IoT architecture and the perspective of the main technologies of IoT is paid attention. And this market that IoT added to other services in the public sector would generate $4.6 trillion of net profit globally in the next decade. Therefore, government leaders and public safety organizations should start exploring the full potential that IoT could offer to public safety.Originality/valueThe research will develop the theory of IOT, which is valuable to strengthen the IOT technology innovation and the application extension. The application of IOT in public safety will enhance the ability to supervise the public safety and guarantee the safe social condition for people’s life. So it is valuable in theory and in practice.

"Playing the system": Structural factors potentiating mental health stigma, challenging awareness, and creating barriers to care for Canadian public safety personnel.

There are growing concerns about the impact of public safety work on the mental health of public safety personnel; as such, we explored systemic and individual factors that might dissuade public safety personnel from seeking care. Public safety personnel barriers to care-seeking include the stigma associated with mental disorders and frequent reports of insufficient access to care. To better understand barriers to care-seeking, we thematically analyzed the optional open-ended final comments provided by over 828 Canadian public safety personnel as part of a larger online survey designed to assess the prevalence of mental disorders among public safety personnel. Our results indicated that systematic processes may have (1) shaped public safety personnel decisions for care-seeking, (2) influenced how care-seekers were viewed by their colleagues, and (3) encouraged under-awareness of personal mental health needs. We described how public safety personnel who do seek care may be viewed by others; in particular, we identified widespread participant suspicion that coworkers who took the time to address their mental health needs were "abusing the system." We explored what constitutes "abusing the system" and how organizational structures-systematic processes within different public safety organizations-might facilitate such notions of abuse. We found that understaffing may increase scrutiny of injured public safety personnel by those left to manage the additional burden; in addition, cynicism and unacknowledged structural stigma may emerge, preventing the other public safety personnel from identifying their mental health needs and seeking help. Finally, we discuss how system-level stigma can be potentiated by fiscal constraints when public safety personnel take any leave of absence, inadvertently contributing to an organizational culture wherein help-seeking for employment-related mental health concerns becomes unacceptable. Implications for public safety personnel training and future research needs are discussed.

Gun Politics & Policymaking under Uncertainty:The Jolt of Marauding Terrorist Firearm Attacks

Recent marauding terrorist firearm attacks have acted as an environmental jolt, mobilizing policymakers worldwide to consider changes in policing strategies that are likely to shape public safety, governance, society, businesses, communities, and other organizations, impacting the lives of individuals in society. This article uses a mixed-methods study to highlight the key philosophical, ethical and fiscal questions embedded within this policy debate, in particular, whether to arm all London Metropolitan Police Service officers with guns. Through this exploration, the paper takes up the 2018 Academy of Management theme to contribute to a safer, more inclusive society by joining the dialogue in organization studies about decision-making during times of uncertainty and makes theoretical extensions by linking environmental jolt and bounded rationality theory with current political debates about an ‘Americanisation’ of UK policies.

Successful Use of Advertisement Pictures to Assist Recall in a Food-Borne Hepatitis A Outbreak in The Netherlands, 2017

This study describes an outbreak investigation of 14 hepatitis A cases in the Netherlands. The hepatitis A virus (HAV) genotype IB sequences in cases were highly similar (459/460 nt). The origin of strains could be narrowed to Bulgaria based on information from EPIS-FWD. As an association with consumption of soft fruit was suspected, a case–control study was initiated using a questionnaire and a list of pictures of soft fruit available at the supermarket chain involved. Twelve out of 13 cases consumed a specific frozen raspberry/blueberry product shown on the list (OR 46.0, 95% CI 5.0–27). In multivariable regression analysis this product was the only risk factor (aOR 26.6, 95% CI 2.0–263). Laboratory analyses could not demonstrate HAV-RNA in batches that had been on the market in the incubation period of patients. Trace back of frozen fruit showed that raspberries had been traded by a producer in Bulgaria. After withdrawal of the product from the supermarket no new cases were reported. Use of advertisement pictures of consumed food was helpful in this investigation. Suspicion of the source was strengthened by data from molecular typing and food trace back activities, underlining the importance of good (inter)national cooperation between public health and food safety organisations.

Ensuring Public Safety Organisations' Information Flow and Situation Picture in Hybrid Environments

This article describes how Public Safety Organisations (PSO) come up against hybrid, demanding operations like terrorist attack or school shootings more frequently. Obtaining a realistic situation picture is crucial in organising the rescue operation and in minimising further violence. The role of PSOs' 24/7 situation centres becomes vital. In this paper, the authors explore how PSOs can ensure an information flow and a situation picture in hybrid environments. The empirical data were official reports and the data collected through interviews with staff at different PSOs. It was analysed using qualitative content analysis. Achieving a common operational picture involves taking account of each authority's needs and constraints, thereby enabling the exchange of relevant information between key authorities on-scene and off-scene. In addition, human factors play an important role in complex, multi-authority missions. Furthermore, the increasing role of citizens and social media in producing valuable information should not be overlooked.

IEEE Access Special Section Editorial: Mission Critical Public-Safety Communications: Architectures, Enabling Technologies, and Future Applications

Disaster management organizations such as fire brigades, rescue teams, and emergency medical service providers have a high priority demand to communicate with each other and with the victims by using mission-critical voice and data communications [item 1) in the Appendix]. In recent years, public safety agencies and organizations have started planning to evolve their existing land mobile radio system (LMRS) with long-term evolution (LTE)-based public safety solutions which provides broadband, ubiquitous, and mission-critical voice and data services. LTE provides high bandwidth and low latency services to the customers using internet protocol-based LTE network. Since mission critical communication services have different demands and priorities for dynamically varying situations for disaster-hit areas, the architecture and the communication technologies of the existing LTE networks need to be upgraded with a system that has the capability to respond efficiently and in a timely manner during critical situations.

Interagency Collaboration in Mass Gatherings: The Case of Public Health and Safety Organizations in the 2012 London Olympic Games

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