Drakontas: Drexel University spinoff to launch collaborative, public safety DragonForce update

If you were a software engineer with Drakontas, the tactical, collaborative communications shop with offices in Glenside and Camden, you would be a licensed firearm owner. It’s part of the job — and they’re looking to hire someone else now.

When building tools for high-pressure units like SWAT teams, it’s of particular use for developers to know how the customer will be using each product, says Drakontas co-founder and COO James Sim.

“The software engineering team embeds with tactical teams for trials. We put on our pants and goggles and go out into the field,” he said. “Our people have been partnered with a sniper in the mud and freezing cold, getting shot at in simulations with flash bangs and tear gas. It’s a different kind of software engineering experience.”

Following military space research from Drexel University professors Moshe Kam and William Regli and other researchers, Drakontas was founded in 2004 by Sim and Regli’s brother and company CEO Brian.

With nine full time employees, the company is working to roll out in Q3 2012 the latest full version of its DragonForce team collaboration software, built for small tactical groups like SWAT or hazardous waste response or others in security, law enforcement or disaster management, said CTO Alan Kaplan.

Read more

Philly Rap Sheet: web scraper shows new arrests in Philadelphia, made by Andrew McGill

Interested in who’s getting arrested in Philadelphia?

Then visit Philly Rap Sheet, “a web scraper that scans Philadelphia’s municipal court system every half hour for new arrests and posts them online,” says the developer, Andrew McGill. “You can filter by date, by bail amount, by crime, by the arresting officer and by the judge.”

Though for now the tool is dependent on court clerks uploading docket sheets, McGill, 23, said “they’re pretty prompt with getting this information online after an arraignment.”

McGill said the city courts online docket sheet database interface is fine for finding specific people but has always come up short in showing any more nuanced requests, like recent arrests or specific crimes on specific days.

Read more

SpotCrime.com: former Philadelphia resident turns tragedy into data

SpotCrime.com screenshot showing its database goes back several years, older than many other services online.

On May 7, 1998, 23-year-old Wharton Ph.D student Shannon Schieber was strangled to death on her second-floor apartment by Troy Graves, who would later be characterized as a serial Center City rapist.

That’s about the time when Colin Drane first moved near 22nd and Chestnut streets in Center City.

“I believe this was part of my inspiration to inform the public and help catch bad guys,” Drane, 41, said. It felt like a Penn student was assaulted every day that September, he added.

His form of detective work? Data. In 2007, Drane launched SpotCrime.com, one of a handful of national city crime data aggregation tools. Drane has been collecting crime reports in Philadelphia for more than four years, first by scraping news reports, then through a daily data dump from the police department.

Read more

CrimeReports.com partnership with latest six months of Philadelphia Police crime data

Homicides, assaults and robberies between early February and early August 2011 according to CrimeReports.com, using newly released Philadelphia Police Department data.

Updated 12pm 8/10/11 details on existing police department mapping tool.

Preliminary public safety reports from the last six months, the deepest public archive to date, are now being published online by the Philadelphia Police Department in a partnership with CrimeReports.com.

“We want to help create a cycle in which police departments share more data and the general public delivers value back with more information from their communities,” said Greg Whisenant, the CEO of Public Engines, which publishes CrimeReports.

The five-year-old Salt Lake City firm is offering at no cost its proprietary software that is installed on the police’s private server to extract, clean and publish incident reports, said CEO Whisenant. Normally the software would cost at minimum “a few hundred dollars a month,” he said. There is currently no API for the Philadelphia police data, though Whisenant said his company could provide one.

Read more

APCO public safety conference: Motorola, others show off law enforcement technologies [VIDEO]

The 77th annual conference of the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials International will close at the Pennsylvania Convention Center tomorrow after four days sharing and selling the latest and greatest in law enforcement technologies.

Technically Philly caught up with Motorola representatives, who have been pitching the Philadelphia Police on an array of upgrades to its existing contract partnership, including the 4G broadband network for video surveillance the Motorola team demoed this spring. Philly cops are still evaluating those build outs with the city’s Division of Technology, confirmed Motorola spokesman Matthew Messinger.

Read more

Motorola to Philly Police: You want a public safety 4G broadband network for video surveillance

Saurabh Singhal, a senior software engineer at Motorola, drives a patrol car equipped with a laptop that feds live video via Motorola's high-speed Internet. Photo by Sarah Schu

Motorola put on something of a show at the Police Academy last week, hoping to gain support and funding for a secured, private, public safety 4G broadband network for video surveillance.

Motorola representatives, including Rishi Bhaskar, vice president of solutions, demoed the video equipment, highlighting prioritization, quality and need in a conference room, before showing off a Philadelphia Police patrol car equipped with the equipment.

Depending on the build out, the network would support high-quality video in police and other first responder vehicles, allowing for dispatcher prioritization to reduce stress on the system, Bhaskar said. First responders would be equipped with an emergency button so that they could automatically call for video coverage of, say, pulling over a driver with a violent history.

“This is an investment in public safety,” Bhaskar said.

Though held at the academy on State Road in the Northeast, no Philadelphia Police Department officials were present. Rather, Bhaskar said Motorola had presented the technology to police and city brass earlier in the day. The day’s presentation was a hope to garner support for the project from the city, which Bhaskar said is a ‘long-time client of Motorola.’

The technology has already been deployed in [Updated: though the contract has been awarded, the technology has not yet been launched in Harris County, Texas] Harris County, Texas and the San Francisco area, said spokesman Matthew Messinger, noting that the latter was funded by a $50 million grant that Motorola matched and included an institutional public component that benefited places like hospitals and schools.

“We have the best website platform of any police department in the country” says Det. Justin Frank

By nature, cops don’t seem to boast much.

Yet a year after the Philadelphia Police Department launched its new phillypolice.com website, with a growing, information-focused social media campaign and a growing internal climate to leverage communications technology for the best, there is innovation to be proud of down at the Roundhouse.

“When a detective is investigating a crime… you can only knock on so many doors,” says Lieutenant Raymond Evers, the commanding officer of police media relations with 18 years in the force. “Instead, now we push out the video of someone we’re looking for and we start getting tips right away…We are using tools now we never thought possible.”

Utilizing the immediacy of communications technology, the police sought an extensive and committed sourcing of citizen tips to seek out suspects for the Kensington Strangler serial killer. In a far less criticized movement, it’s already become common place, leads coming from social media and an increasingly better trafficked website.

Read more

Montgomery County publishes public safety emergencies online

Montgomery County's Department of Public Safety publishes emergency incidents online in several formats including a Google Map mashup.

The Montgomery County Department of Public Safety is using its Web site to post up-to-the-minute details of dispatched emergency calls, like fire, EMS and traffic incidents, garnering some attention from national government tech glossy Government Technology.

Along with a map of incidents (pictured), an RSS feed of activity, and a live audio feed of the department’s EMS and fire scanners, the department even offers a mobile version of the incident list.

According to department officials, the site was developed to reduce incoming calls from media inquiring about incidents. The site has “dramatically reduced” the number of calls, the publication reports, from 50 to 100 calls to sometimes two calls per day. The site gets 60,000 hits per month, officials say.

News to us is that Philadelphia’s police, fire and EMS audio feeds are also available online.