Emerging Technologies in Public Safety

When you put the peanut butter and jelly together, you can do powerful things to make it easy for the mind to catch that vision

This week we interview David Blankinship as Co-Founder of Intterra.  David started his career with Colorado Springs Utilities, then transferred to the Colorado Springs Fire Department as a Senior GIS Analyst for 10+ years.  While serving with the CSFD, David supported disasters and major incidents across the country using GIS.  As Co-Founder of Intterra he works with customers and industry to leverage best practices and innovate new ways to improve GIS for public safety agencies.

We talked about the technical challenges implementing technology in public safety. Some of those challenges include how the department culture is the ability. We also talked about the emerging technologies that are certain to happen with the younger group of firefighters and police officers coming into the service.

We all talk about pushing experience and seeing the growth of technology public safety and how things have gotten better over the past few years.

Some of the lessons learned in an interview include

• Be open to change
• Be flexible and adaptable in emerging technologies
• Look for ways to innovate within your own department
• Data is the key to making good critical decisions
• Consider technology and data just as important as apparatus
• Explore ways how technology makes us safe

In a future episode we’re gonna talk about the Fire Data Lab and how big data helps make helps departments make good decisions.