Government Affairs
POLICY BRIEFS

Public safety

Background
Motorola has a long history innovating, developing, and supplying technology that enhances public safety. We developed the first mobile police car radio, speeding law enforcement and fire rescue response to citizen pleas for help. Drawing on that history and expertise, we have developed a "mission-critical" design philosophy. Put simply, we work with the emergency response community to ensure that their mission critical requirements are built into the entire emergency communications system, from the radio in the first responders' gloved hands to the network infrastructure that supports them and ties together the entire range of agencies servicing the public. The evolution of this technology has strengthened our capability to plan for, prevent, protect against, respond to and recover from day to day incidents as well as special events and hazards.

The impact today
We live in a world that has seen the unimaginable happen with alarming regularity in recent years. From the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in America to the bombings in London and Spain to the staggering natural disasters of Hurricane Katrina and the Indian Ocean tsunami, public safety has vaulted to the forefront of public consciousness and government policy-making. Such scrutiny and urgency has exposed flaws in the systems and raised many difficult questions of how to proceed, such as where to begin, how to create better coordination among agencies and how to fund the infrastructure required. The process for developing answers to these many questions is complicated by the fact that many jurisdictions are involved, from the local to the national and international level.

There are a variety of challenges to public safety: some are technical, some financial, and some stem from human factors such as inadequate planning and lack of awareness. Motorola is working with the public safety community to identify the capabilities needed to ensure the availability and interoperability of communications during emergencies and helping the public safety community take advantage of emerging technologies and solutions for the future.

Motorola supports federal, state and local efforts toward increasing public safety through planning, interoperability across agencies and jurisdictions combined with proper support, training and equipment for first responders. Technology enables systemic planning for resiliency to mitigate widespread issues and disaster recovery to save lives and restore public service quickly. Similar technologies can be deployed within other far-flung systems, such as the food system, to prevent or mitigate potential issues that would otherwise be difficult to trace.

Motorola position
Motorola advocates for policy and legislation on the basis of a three-pronged strategy toward enhancing public safety:

• Enhanced funding
• Use of standards
• Allocation of spectrum

Enhanced funding: In the United States, Motorola supports the continuation and further funding of several federal programs aimed at providing money to local law enforcement and first responders to improve their infrastructure and grow the number of first responders on the street. Congress establishes the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) budget in the Homeland Security appropriations bill, which contains funding levels for State and local grant programs that support emergency communications and interoperability solutions. The largest programs supporting interoperable communications are the State Homeland Security Grant Program, the Urban Areas Security Initiative, and the Interoperable Communications Equipment Grant Program. However, interoperable communications are eligible expenditures in other programs focused on rail, trucking, bus, cargo, and ports. Additionally, Congress establishes funding for State and local law enforcement assistance programs in the Department of Justice (DOJ) appropriations bill. Motorola has supported the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grants and Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) Law Enforcement Technologies Programs. These grant programs fund a wide range of eligible law enforcement activities, including technology improvement. More recently, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 contained funding for the Border Tactical Communications Program and an upgrade for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That package further contained specific funding for bolstering local and state grant programs.

Use of standards: Motorola is a strong supporter of standards-based interoperable communications for public safety to enable cross-agency coordination in a crisis. Standards-based equipment provides emergency response agencies the flexibility to select equipment that best meets their unique technical requirements and budget constraints. The Project 25 (P25) standards have been developed by the public safety users, working in cooperation with the manufacturers, and are published by the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA). Project 25 has been supported by most public safety user organizations and has also received broad support at the federal level from agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Department of Defense (DoD) and DHS. Continued support for P25 in the major federal law enforcement and emergency management agencies, as well as in Congress, is important because many states are in the process of upgrading their statewide systems to modern digital P25 technologies and the federal support for the standards have had an important impact on state and local procurement decisions. Motorola has supported this standard as a user-driven initiative, consistent with our belief that the real users of this public-service technology should be part of specifying the solution. The use of standards also encompasses the use of narrow-band voice and data systems from today into the future and as we look toward providing public safety with access to mobile broadband, it is important that a standards-based approach be pursued.

Allocation of spectrum: As the public-safety toolbox expands, the ability to utilize wireless communications capabilities effectively becomes increasingly important. Motorola supports additional spectrum allocations for public safety usage and the enabling of next-generation systems. In particular, Motorola has been a leader in working with the public safety community to promote use of a portion of the Digital Dividend, spectrum freed up from the conversion of TV broadcast to digital signals, for public safety purposes. Just as the transition to digital television is a global move, so is the need for a portion of the recovered spectrum to be available for public safety and Motorola is active around the world to ensure an awareness of the public safety requirement.

In the U.S., 2.4 MHz of spectrum has been set aside for public safety, with an additional 10 MHz conditioned on being available to public safety during emergencies. As the FCC contemplates how to best make the portion of this spectrum identified for public safety broadband available, it should ensure that the unique coverage, control and availability requirements for public safety are met. These requirements are often very different than the requirements for commercial systems and can vary from locality to locality. Accordingly, the Commission must ensure tha the is sufficient local input an control of the systems.

Motorola advocates for the harmonization of policies and legislation around the world. For instance, Motorola supports efforts in the European Union (EU) to dedicate sufficient spectrum to emergency services as the EU debates a broad telecoms package of legislation. Motorola supports actionable steps being taken by leaders around the world to significantly accelerate and move the state of public safety forward. These steps include ensuring communications resiliency during emergencies and recovery efforts and direction for private sector involvement in standards development, advanced communications technologies, and services development and deployment.

Motorola advocates, though, that no program be entirely "top-down" in nature. Efforts to improve public safety cannot move forward without the collaboration of the front line public safety professionals such as police, fire, technicians and inspectors who are daily enmeshed in the tactical working of these systems.