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.

Above, watch a video demo of a Drakontas-made social mobile app for collaboration.

A key enhancement of the next DragonForce version is its flexibility to create groups that can share some projects and hide others. Put in action, think of Drakontas customer the York County government. Police, fire and ambulance leaders could visit the web application via a shared VPN to create and share tools and information assets. During a large event (hurricane, snow storm or terrorist attack), team leaders could be coordinating escape routes or location planning on blueprints or maps, allowing all disaster teams to be directed smartly and in a coordinated effort. During smaller events, police units could keep their materials private from other agencies.

“This is one way to solve the interoperability problem that governments and their first responders so often have,” said Sim. “This is one software package that otherwise can function autonomously, but can be used to inter-operate across users.”

The company will also roll out two native applications, one for Windows Mobile — which Kaplan says tends to be used on devices popular with disaster management leaders because of their ruggedness and battery life — and later another for Android devices, though iOS apps may follow as iPhones and iPads reach the enterprise, he adds. Some large partnerships could be named next year as well, Kaplan said.

When asked about differentiation in the competitive security communications space, which is dominated by big players, Sim is firm: “We make it a point to know what the client needs to be able to do. This is a group of individuals that if they make a mistake, someone can get killed. Software doesn’t get much more serious than that.”

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.

For now, though a sure improvement, his side project is also short on features but he has plans for many to come, he said, like email alerts based on keywords or bail amount threshold. He’s also in the process of building an API that would allow third parties to query the data set, for options like an RSS feed, and is debating whether to move from its mySQL database to Google Fusion Tables for more open access. He recently added permalinks for individual arrests.

Andrew McGill

His clearest ask of the city courts to improve his tool is that more geographical information be included, like where the crime happened, “but you can’t have everything,” he said. His courts-based system also shows the divide between the legal system and the public safety agencies, which present their own data options.

The Penn State journalism graduate grew up in suburban Cheltenham and follows the local technology community, though he currently lives in Allentown working for that city’s daily newspaper the Morning Call.

“I’ve always had a passion for programming and web design, started out making computer games in BASIC in elementary school, am now versed in PHP/python etc.,” he said. “It’s a nice homecoming to be able to use those nerd skills in journalism.”

The project took three weeks of his free time, McGill said. The site gets about 1,000 new arrests a week, roughly 20 an hour during weekdays, McGill added.

“It endlessly frustrated me that while there was this great crime data out there, it wasn’t categorized in a way that made it easy to search,” McGill said. “By liberating this data, hopefully some meaning cross-referencing can be made and trends will emerge.”

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.

Colin Drane

Last year, SpotCrime.com, published by Drane’s parent company ReportSee, was sued, in a landmark case, by PublicEngines, the company behind SpotCrime.com and last month’s partnership announcement with the Philadelphia Police. The case, settled out of court, was watched closely and, in the end, resulted in a decision that SpotCrime, which scrapes free resources, couldn’t use information from CrimeReports, which partners, like it did here in Philadelphia, with crime safety organizations.

SpotCrime was using a public feed from Irving, TX “for free for three years,” when it was recently turned off by the police department in exchange for the CrimeReports proprietary system, Drane said.

“That’s an important story,” Drane said, but he can’t legally talk about it, as part of the settlement.

Currently, SpotCrime tracks some 500 feeds, but, as Drane says, “it fluctuates because [while] many cities are becoming open with their data… some are moving their data behind [other] proprietary systems.”

Drane pointed to Omega, one of the industry’s big players, which just added terms of use that cut off SpotCrime from using data from Omega’s partners, which number in the hundreds of U.S. cities, Drane said, and restrict even manually recording and distributing the information.

“The data is much more valuable if you have monopoly control. It is bad for the public because access is limited,” Drane said. “The optimal value to the public is to make it free to everyone and increase the probability that the public is going to be more informed and ultimately safer. But, if you are going to allow a monopoly of the data, then the entity receiving the monopoly control should probably pay for that control.”

SpotCrime was launched to remain open, he said.

The site launched in 2007 in Baltimore, where Drane moved around 2000 to open up an office for a shipping company he was launching. After selling it and launching SpotCrime in Baltimore, he then followed up with Dallas and Washington D.C., where there were existing open police data feeds — and then launched in his old home, Philadelphia that year.

Now still living in Baltimore, Drane says Philadelphia remains one of his bigger markets, sending out 30,000 daily emails here out of 3.5 million sent every month nationally.

ReportSee has two employees and, though he’s involved in other projects (like recently publishing a true crime book), he spends “90 percent” of his time on SpotCrime and its related cirime data sites.

“We consider ourselves a news organization,” Drane said, “and so we take the sharing of information that important.”

Spotcrime.com, which is funded by advertising, “isn’t the prettiest site,” Drane said. “We’re like craligslist, no frills, just what you need. We’re more about the distribution because we just want the information available.”

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.

“We first need to get agencies comfortable with the idea of releasing data,” Whisenant said. “There are other services we provide that we think in the future could interest [our clients], like tools for citizens to provide anonymous tips via text or smartphones.”

Calls and e-mails for comment from the police department’s office of media relations were not returned in time for publication.

Currently, sharing the last six months of data is the standard among CrimeReports clients, though Whisenant said “eventually I think we’ll see agencies offering an open API of all their data.”

Previous to the July announcement, the police department’s GIS infrastructure-based Google-based mapping service would only allow access to data from 30-day periods, though information does go back to 2007  the previous 30 days and developers in the city had found access to the database in previous hackathons. This increased data release was cited last year as another coming development from a police department aiming to make use of technology.

“We keep data longer than six months and can accommodate historical data,” Whisenant said, so the possibility for a rich API with years worth of data is possible if political support is there for it.

Real estate site Trulia has a popular Philadelphia crime map that relies on SpotCrime data, using news accounts and incident reports, though timing is limited unless after a free sign up neither date beyond the 30-days previously provided by the police department. SpotCrime users who are signed in have access to more than three years of data, which is now updated by daily spreadsheet releases from the police after having scraped from the police mapping website and using Inquirer reports at its start, said founder Colin Drane.

Other police departments in the region providing data to CrimeReports.com now include Norristown, Evesham, Moorestown, Haverford. CrimeReports.com claims to offer ‘affordable cloud-based software tools’ for more than 1,800 law enforcement agencies in the country.

“The City of Philadelphia and its police department, starting with Commissioner Ramsey is creating a beter partnership with the public,” said Whisenant. “They seem eager, and I believe it’s real.”

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.

In addition to the proposed private broadband network build out for video surveillance, which has been piloted in San Francisco, a Motorola representative showed off other high-end communication tools and toys being developed and deployed, including the following:

• LTE cloud-core solutions, debuted Monday, that would offer flexibility from smaller to larger agencies able to export all of its cloud communication or to host with limited Motorola support. A related network initiative that offers a partnership between the private Motorola public safety LTE network and the public Verizon Wireless 4G network, allowing for uninterrupted service is being trumpeted as a first of its kind.

• Also unveiled were the VML700 LTE vehicle modem and UM1000 LTE USB modem, both of which access the Band Class 14 700 MHz broadband spectrum allocated to public safety.

• Updated APX radios, featuring increased durability, clarity and connectivity and other related tools that track physiological team sensors and GPS-based location during fire or SWAT movements

Inside the convention hall expo across three halls, a variety of other telecommunications giants like Sprint were showing off their own law enforcement-focused innovations, electronic equipment giants like Harris were demoing detailed arrays of on-the-job tools and a smattering of startups and niche firms were talking on anything from GPS-driven robotics and secure temporary messaging devices.

Next year the APCO conference will be in Minneapolis. See the complete media kit from these initiatives here.

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.

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.

This new era kicked off Dec. 31, 2009, with the new website launch, built with open source CMS SilverStripe on a Google site. Using the internet was an initiative from Commissioner Charles Ramsey, who brought in June 2008 his Communications Director Karima Zedan, who was previously with University of Pennsylvania public safety, to lead that initiative among others.

“It was a long journey and intense discussion,” says Zedan, 34, with a smile, having launched the project before the on-going city’s Division of Technology consolidation. “But now our technology enables us to do what we do better.”

There are three broad ways the police communications staff has begun utilizing the web for external communication in new ways:

1. A more flexible, better navigable website — After first launched a year ago, the website is continuing to develop into a more streamlined, updated web presence with information of value. “Before, our site was a flat Dreamweaver design that needed an IT lead to update anything,” says Det. Justin Frank, who works under Zedan. “Now it’s open source and the entire communications staff updates it… It’s helped work flow, our productivity and the way we can share information.”
2. Tips-gathering focus in social media — In addition rising follower counters on Twitter and an information-driven Facebook page, the police department has taken to using Google calendars to share its community meetings and Google Groups to grow conversation with residents. “We used to make 40 copies of DVDs of surveillance footage and give to media,” says Frank, who handles much of the police’s social media and has been on the force since April 2002. “Now, 6ABC just can screen capture from the police website or use our Youtube.”
3. Crime data sharing — This website features a crime map, though searches are limited to 30-day periods and the raw data is somewhat cumbersome to collect. Zedan hinted at more to come,  but, under Ramsey, the police department has already returned to a 1990s tradition of being relatively forthcoming with crime data online.

Those are tepid steps to be sure, but, nonetheless, by most accounts, the police department remains one of the city’s more forward-acting agencies in regard to IT, if only because the commissioner’s blog now gets the occasional update (which it hadn’t as of July).

It also helps that the competition isn’t necessary stacked across the country.

Frank, 37, a self-described geek who went from “playing Dungeons and Dragons to carrying a 40 caliber, boasts: “We have the best website platform of any police department in the country.”

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.