Fixed Wireless Business

Every WISP Can Help the Sheriff

Every WISP wants to help the police, and several are already doing so. We talk to the officer driving the longest running wireless broadband police car installation in the U.S. that we know of.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [July 7, 2006]

Not every ISP has a testimonial like this one. Chief Criminal Deputy Watkins writes:

I use the wireless internet all of the time to communicate via emails, look up state laws/ordinances etc. from my patrol car. In one case, I responded to a bank robbery in which the bank teller was assaulted and bound with Duct Tape. I was able to call the Sheriff's Office from the field and have a photo montage sent to me via the wireless internet to my patrol car to see if the victim could identify the suspect that robbed and assaulted her. This was much quicker then the old method of driving back to the office and putting the montage together myself and driving back to the victim. When investigating crimes, time is of the essence and the wireless internet is priceless when it comes to time savings.

Marlon Schafer of Odessa Office Equipment, one of the earliest WISPs, connected Watkins' police car to his wireless internet service back in 2001 (installation photos here).

When he received the testimonial last September, Schafer e-mailed us and told us this would be a good story. Many ISPs, Schafer told us, want to help their local sheriff but many don't know what they can do.

When Watkins e-mailed us his cell phone number, we called him up to ask about it. He was in the car, patrolling.

The Lincoln County Sheriff's department covers 2,200 square miles, Watkins told us, with a population of about 10,000. Every extra minute in the field helps, even when there isn't a bank robbery. "When you're visible, you deter crime by being out in the communities," he said. "I don't know how you put a price on that."

Sometimes the work is even more important. "I can be sitting by the road running radar, or I could be doing surveillance."

Just recently, Watkins told us, the Sheriff's department busted a meth house near a school. "I was able to write the report while I was there," he said.

If you want to help
So if you want to help, but don't know where to start, whom should you talk to? Watkins told us that in his department you'd talk to him, to the Undersheriff, or to the Sheriff.

Schafer offered free service at first, followed by a discount rate he offers to government entities and to churches, Watkins said. Watkins noted that Schafer's service covers part of the county, but not all of it.

Watkins is also a fan of the Blackberry. "It's my day planner, phone, internet. I use it to get e-mails from work and when I delete them off the Blackberry, they delete off the computer at the office and vice versa. That's very handy. I live 40 miles from the office."

He's also found GPS useful. "I was called out to a domestic on a rural county road with no county signs at the border and I used the GPS to find the county line. The house in question was within a quarter mile of the county line but didn't know this without GPS."

Of course, had the house been on the other side of the county line, a different Sheriff's department would have been responsible for the call, so Watkins had to make sure the home was within his jurisdiction.

So you don't know every house you pass? "We've got 10,000 people and rolling wheat field and cattle. You could be 45 minutes away from some calls."

Soon, the department will have all of its cars wired. While Watkins has office responsibilities that keep him off the road, he says that officers on patrol can cover 200 to 400 miles per day.

Being able to identify people will further deter crime, he believes. "I'd like to be able to search Alex Goldman's name and get the dates and times of cautions, see if there was a protection order. If I stopped you on a traffic stop and you were uncooperative, I could have the DoL [Department of Licensing] e-mail me send a photo to me in the car. This would aid in positive identification."

The state of California, he says, already has a magnetic stripe on the driver's license with important information on it. A recent story in Wired Magazine, Dragnet Reinvented, talks about a system for searching for stolen cars. That's an issue in Lincoln County, Washington, too.

As police departments across the nation modernize, there seems to be no leadership from, say, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). But Sheriff's departments will need good secure technology. We expect that in the future, a national organization like the National Sheriffs' Association (NSA) will set security and privacy standards for police networks. Watkins told us that the Sheriff's department knows that people have police scanners and is careful not to broadcast, say, the exact address of a domestic disturbance over the radio.

(In fact, the NSA and DHS are working together on one important issue: providing training on the handling of WMDs.)

Meanwhile, every WISP that wants to serve the Sheriff should pick up the phone or walk into the office. Of course, it helps if you're already a presence in the community, as Schafer is. Whether it's free hot dogs on July Fourth or discounted service to the city government (as both Schafer and, say, Google, are doing), every local ISP should seize the opportunity to connect their business to the community, connecting the internet network to the network of daily life, as Schafer has done with the Lincoln County Sheriff's office.

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