If someone in your family has special medical needs — a parent with dementia, for example, or a child with sensitivity to loud noises — Smart911 is a valuable innovation. That’s the free public service that lets individuals create safety profiles with key information that’s shared with 911 call-takers and responders during an emergency. That way responders can know in advance, for example, to mute their sirens as they approach or perhaps double-check any history they get from grandma.
Similarly, buildings can have unique details and attributes that may be useful for responders to know before entering, and Motorola Solutions’ new Protected Places Program creates a mechanism for sharing them.
An add-on to its popular CommandCentral Aware situational awareness platform, Protected Places is a technology partnership that connects public safety with local businesses and provides them real-time visibility and critical information during incidents. This can range from basic details like floor plans and emergency contacts to streaming video from on-premises cameras.
“It’s a way to help meet the public where they are in terms of engagement with public safety,” said Todd Miller, the company’s director of SaaS (software as a service) operations and strategic programs. “It allows business owners to create what we call a facility profile, and that lets them tell public safety, ‘Here’s what you need to know about my facility should I ever have an emergency.’”
That can obviously be a big benefit in commercial settings. Miller described the program at the Motorola Solutions 2025 Summit, held in May at the 125-acre Gaylord Texan resort in Grapevine, Texas. Imagine being dispatched to a property that vast with no prior knowledge of its operations, amenities or layout — you could arrive quickly but still be a long way from a victim in need.
It can also be useful to venues like schools, hospitals and government facilities. And there are several ways businesses and other entities can participate.
What should responders know?
At the most basic level, even the smallest businesses can provide fundamental details like floor plans, entry and exit points, and emergency contact information that might help responders. There’s no formal template for participating.
“Every business is a little bit different,” noted Miller. “What might be important to your small shop might be different than the pharmaceutical company down the road — they have different needs and so might be sharing different profiles with public safety. ‘If there’s a fire, here’s where our dangerous chemicals are.’ It can span from the small shopkeeper up to the major enterprise and everything in between.”
Participation can also scale up. Entities can add additional layers such as emergency notifications like those from Rave Mobile Safety, which can push app alerts, text messages, email notifications and voice calls to those in danger’s way or with a need to know. Beyond that are images — if you have a camera system protecting your business, you can register it so authorities know it’s available in cases where the events it captures might be useful.
The highest level of participation upgrades that to full end-to-end integration, where participants can link their systems and stream video directly to responders via CommandCentral Aware.
“In that case, we provide businesses a way to securely attach themselves into CommandCentral Aware and stream video directly,” Miller said. “Then the next time that there’s a 911 call from that location, Aware is made immediately aware of that situation, and we can start to bring in that streaming video in real time.”
Payoffs: An LPR arrest and a cardiac save
Police departments and local law enforcement have important roles to play in supporting and growing programs that can enhance public safety. Motorola can also help deliver community outreach and explain the benefits of tying into a program like Protected Places.
“We have a tremendous amount of expertise around helping communities engage and find the right level of participation,” Miller said. “It takes an ongoing effort to engage with the community, and we can help public safety with a playbook: ‘How do I stay top of mind for the public? How can I maybe engage some of my community stakeholders and leaders so they understand what we’re trying to accomplish and get them to buy in?’”
Some success stories can help, and those are accumulating. At the summit, representatives from a mid-size community in Indiana that’s added its schools into Protected Places told of experiencing a disturbing incident after which school cameras captured images of the suspect’s vehicle as it left. They couldn’t get a full plate number, but using Motorola’s LPR technology were able to plug in the make, model and color and find a match. That plate went onto a hotlist, and within 60 minutes, the driver was apprehended.
“That’s something that wouldn’t have happened even five years ago without these types of partnerships and sharing agreements that enable that type of rapid response,” noted Miller. “Five years ago, you’d have sent an officer out with maybe a thumb drive to ask, ‘All right, who has access to this information? Where do I go?’ while losing all sorts of time. So this dramatically reduces the time needed to respond.”
In another recent case, a high school football player collapsed in Virginia. His coach immediately activated the panic button on his phone, both summoning 911 and notifying other key stakeholders of the medical emergency. That included athletic trainers and the school nurse. While the ambulance took several minutes to arrive, staff were able to be on scene in seconds and start CPR quickly — an essential key to resuscitation success.
One size doesn’t fit all
Entities that wish to participate in the Protected Places Program need not have camera systems from Motorola Solutions; cloud connectors enable the easy integration of off-the-shelf hardware and devices from other manufacturers.
“Maybe it’s a mom-and-pop shop that bought a security system at Costco —that’s a different caliber of system, but nonetheless, we still want to be able to support those,” said Miller. “Our Safety Hub is an edge device that can be deployed and let these cameras plug in. So the mom-and-pop shops on Main Street, regardless of what they have for video, can participate in this program simply by using this edge device.”
That’s a lot of flexibility in who can participate and how — and that’s been a key to the fast initial growth of Protected Places, which was just created at the end of 2023.
“I think public safety understands that one size doesn’t fit all,” Miller added. “What we’re bringing to the table is that ability to crawl, walk, then run, or participate and progress at whatever pace you need and in a way that fits best within your community. Our reach is pretty vast, and we have experience doing things at scale.”
LEARN MORE: In this episode of the Policing Matters podcast, part of a special report from Motorola Solutions Summit 2025, host Jim Dudley sits down with Mike Armitage, the executive director of Calhoun County Consolidated Dispatch Authority and Lashinda Stair, retired assistant police chief and current industry team director with Motorola Solutions to discuss how programs that connect law enforcement and community organizations and businesses can help first responders be better informed during emergencies.
Click here to access all our coverage from Motorola Solutions Summit 2025.
