Public Safety & Emergency Management Technology Initiatives

The City of Boston is working on a myriad of projects related to Public Safety and Emergency Management.  These projects are designed to improve and enhance agency efficiency and cost savings for the City.  Boston continues to be a technology innovator with many new, innovative projects related to our public safety operations.  We’re integrating our public safety projects with the City’s overall Open Government mandate.  And we’re part of a national group leading the way on a public safety broadband network. Our Emergency Management team is leveraging GIS technology to help document impact scenarios and develop appropriate response plans.

Enhanced Efficiency & Cost Savings Projects

Enterprise Mobility Network
Designed and begun implementation of Enterprise mobility VPN architecture for Police, Fire and EMS, replacing the individual departmental systems.  This enterprise system will allow mobile devices currently on an internal network to exist on broadband.  Previous departmental systems were not highly redundant and did not offer the technical and functional capabilities our public safety agencies require. The “Enterprise Mobility Framework” is a geo-redundant high-availability VPN solution that supports broadband mobility over commercial wireless and WiFi Networks.

VoIP for Public Safety Agencies
A VoIP telephone system was installed at the new Police district B-2 station. This is the first public safety facility in the City to be 100% VoIP enabled reducing the operating expense of what would have been a traditional CENTREX installation.  This is part of our broader project to roll out VOIP city-wide.

Public Safety Incident Data Warehousing
The City has begun to store daily Computer Aided Dispatch incident data in the City’s data warehouse. This data is now used for metric analysis on numerous initiatives in the City of Boston. It will also serve as incident history for the new CAD system when fully implemented. This relieved the City from a costly data conversion of historical data that would have cost in excess of half a million dollars.

Advanced Centerline Project
In support of a large Computer Aided Dispatch/Record Management Project, the City of Boston’s GIS team has completed a large scale street centerline conflation project. This effort was to attach best of breed commercial routing and street address ranging data to existing City maintained street centerline data. With this new hybrid dataset, Public Safety and other City staff will have an advanced street network and turn restriction dataset with which to do nearest unit/resource deployment. This data will be further enhanced by inclusion in the overall SAM (Street and Address Management) system.

CAD System Implementation and Business Process Review
This year the City continues its three (3) year plan of implementing a new multiagency Computer Aided Dispatch System.  This project has resulted in an extensive review of business process within the Public Safety agencies – Police, Fire and EMS. They are now reviewing all of their Business Processes, Change Management and fit and gap meetings are underway.

911 Center Upgrades
The two year project to upgrade the Public Safety Answering Point was completed this year to include networking and power infrastructure upgrades to support NextGEN 911.

Public Safety Land Mobile Radio (LMR) Site Mapping
The City has completed a survey to document mission critical voice key radio sites. Based upon the survey a program was created to provide key technology upgrades to those facilities to improve system resiliency and enable future IP based radio systems by extending the BoNET fiber optic network to those sites.

Innovative Approaches to Public Safety

TDM-Over-IP for Mission Critical Voice
This year, the City completed a test pilot for the Boston Fire Department to prove the concept of using the City owned and operated MPLS network (BoNET) to carry TDM (Time-division multiplexing) traffic.  Initial pilot included a satellite receive only site.  The second phase transitioned a simulcast analog transmitter site to the network. The pilot is now being expanded into production with the plan to migrate as many locations from traditional T1 lines to BoNET, thus reducing monthly operating expenses for the T1 lines.  The City is again leveraging BoNET to save thousands of dollars per month and reduce reliance on traditional commercial circuits.

PROJECT 25 Mission Critical Voice Upgrade
The City has begun an upgrade of its mission critical analog voice systems to a standards based citywide Project 25 compliant system beginning with the installation of an ASTRO25 core. This will allow our public safety agencies access to an adaptable and affordable platform solution for mission critical wireless communications.

METFON/LOOP-A Network Development
The City in partnership with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Executive Office of Public Safety and Security (EOPSS) and Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MDOT) has begun a project to share infrastructure and resources to create a statewide fiber optic network, named Metropolitan Fiber Optical Network (METFON).  Using City owned in-street conduits the project has installed a 492 strand fiber optic ring throughout the downtown area and Cambridge to interconnect state and City owned facilities.  The agencies on the METFON network will be able to seamlessly communicate on the secure statewide network.

Wireless Hot Spots for Public Safety
Leveraging BoNET, the City has begun to “light up” WiFi hotspots in ten different sections of the City to enable public safety applications to include permanent and temporary surveillance cameras in high crime areas and high speed broadband access using the Enterprise Mobility Network.

Automated Hydrant Inspection
The Boston Fire Department completed a pilot to automate the annual inspection of fire hydrants throughout the City. The department leveraged the mobile computing platform installed in every piece of front line fire apparatus and the FireHouse™ records management system to allow company officers to directly report and track the fire hydrant inspections in their emergency response zones. Officers no longer rely on a paper list that must be input to the records system when returning from inspection. The department plans to roll out the automated inspection process throughout the department.

Open Government

Police Incident Data
The City has begun publishing Police incident data on the City’s “data hub”. The last 60 days of crime data is published in XML and CSV file formats on a daily basis for analysis by constituents and researchers. 

Data Hub 
Boston's Open Gov Efforts 

Leading The Way 

700MHz Public Safety Broadband
The City continues to play a leadership role in moving the Nationwide Public Safety Broadband Network and was asked to participate in a Vice-Presidential panel at the White House.  The Nationwide Public Safety Broadband Network project continues to move through the legislative process.

Emergency Management Tools


Adopt-a-Hydrant
A web application allowing citizens to "adopt" a hydrant to shovel out of snow to ensure hydrants are accessible in emergency situations.

GIS Tools & Models for Emergency Situations
The Office of Emergency Management is using GIS technology to better document impacts of emergencies on the City of Boston and its resources.  Using GIS applications allows us to map reports of power outages, downed wires and trees, and blocked roadways, etc. during storm situations.  We are also using GIS-based technology to support emergency planning efforts.  HURREVAC is software we used to monitor Hurricane Irene and model the potential impacts of the storm on Boston, based on possible tracks the storm had been forecasted to follow.

Initiatives by Category

Initiatives by Work Unit