If you watch carefully the opening scene of the 1968 cop drama series Adam-12, you’ll see a multilayer track with a card running from the police station to the dispatch center, where a teletype communicator would punch a strip of data and feed it into the phone, which would send it up to Sacramento, where state officials would run the plate. Then they’d do the same thing in reverse to get the information back to the station.
“To run a license plate was a 5-minute process — and that was just for wants,” reminisced Gordon Graham, noted risk management expert and nationally recognized law enforcement leader. “If you wanted to find out who owned the vehicle, it was an hour process. If it was out-of-state, it was a day-long process.”
How far we’ve come since then, Graham noted.
Today’s law enforcement agencies have more technology than ever, and officers depend on nearly instantaneous access to information for safety and situational awareness. But what happens when it’s not there? Is your agency truly prepared for the challenges that occur when a critical piece of technology fails?
Graham returns to IACP to explore the leadership decisions, preparation, training, communications and organizational discipline required to build a truly mission-ready organization in an environment of constant change.
The session, titled “Mission Ready: Leadership for What Comes Next,” presented by T-Priority, is scheduled for Sunday, October 25 from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. in Room W311GH at the 2026 International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Orlando, Florida.
Key themes for the session will include:
Resilience vs. redundancy
A single call can now involve CAD updates, records queries, mapping, live video from drones and body cameras, license plate reader alerts, push-to-talk communications and information shared across agencies. Connectivity and capacity are absolutely critical for these systems to operate.
“What happens when everything goes down?” asked Graham. “How do you recover? What do you have for a backup plan?”
Redundancy is having a backup. Resilience is making sure operations continue regardless of a point of failure. Redundant technology like extra batteries, multiple carriers, automatic failover, PTT, 5G and satellite is a component of resilience, but resilience is focused on ensuring a positive outcome.
Graham will speak about how resilience goes beyond redundancy and the roles people, training, procedures and decisions play in an agency’s ability to adapt on the fly — even if it means resurrecting old-school tools and procedures as a stopgap measure.
Operational readiness
The midst of a major incident or disaster is not the time to learn the limits of your technology. Public safety agencies may not be able to control when the next challenge will arise, but they can control how prepared they are to respond.
Most agencies use multiple vendors for essential technology — drones from one vendor, CAD system from another, communications from others. Are you sure it all works together with a minimum of friction? Operational readiness is being sure that technology works as intended when and where your officers need it, whether in a building, a vehicle, a mobile command center, an urban canyon or a remote one.
It also means staff are trained and tested on using the technology and able to strategize solutions when and if a system fails.
Ownership and accountability
With multiple vendors, to whom do you turn when something fails? It’s easy for responsibility to fall into the gaps between workflows where one technology ends and another begins. The last thing an agency needs when things go wrong is a bunch of finger-pointing. It needs solutions, quickly.
Staffing and budget shortfalls being what they are, many agencies — especially smaller or rural ones — don’t have the luxury of hiring a full-time IT professional as “chief technical officer.” Instead, the job often falls to an officer or group of officers who are the most technically proficient.
Whether an official CTO or resident tech geek, the designated agency point person needs to understand not only how the technology works, but why it’s needed, how it integrates with existing technology and how it stays safe and compliant with CJIS and other requirements. When something goes awry, this agency contact has the relationships to ensure vendors don’t vanish but step up to quickly find solutions.
Cybersecurity and technology complexity
Agencies are navigating increasingly complex technology environments while trying to make smart investments. They have an obligation to spend taxpayer dollars wisely while investing in technologies that won’t limit their future capabilities.
“True leaders think strategically. ‘Where are we going to be, and what do I need to be doing today to make sure we’re successful in the future?’ If you’re locked into, ‘We’ve already tried that, that won’t work’ — you’re doomed,” said Graham. “We need women and men who have the ability to look into the future, identify and evaluate risks, develop, select and implement control measures today to address these future problems.”
Attend the session to be inspired by Graham to be one of those leaders.
Visit Booth 2527 to see how T-Priority delivers mission-ready connectivity built to keep first responders connected when it matters most.
