By Michael Cayes
Mooring Tech, Inc.
This article is provided by Mooring Tech, Inc. and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of Police1.
In times of economic downturn, law enforcement agencies are just as severely affected as other sectors, but with more drastic consequences. How does a department choose between maintaining a full staff at full pay and providing necessary protective gear and equipment? However, that is precisely what many departments are facing. The Department of Justice’s C.O.P.S. site features some data from 2011, when the U.S. was in the midst of a heavy recession; in that time, 53% of county departments were operating on smaller staff than they had been a year previously. There were agencies that reported they had stopped responding to all vehicle thefts, burglar alarms, and non-injury motor vehicle accidents, because they were understaffed and physically could not go to those scenes and risk missing a major physical incident.
The economy has improved marginally since 2014, but some departments still haven’t recovered. They are being more creative about getting more for less, especially when it comes to tech equipment. They are relying more heavily on grants and federal funding where they can. Technology developers have responded in kind and have worked to create more cost-effective solutions for the public safety sector.
MooringTech, one of Panasonic’s trusted distributors, offers the Panasonic line of ToughPads starting at just $1,195. Compared to the cost of a standard tablet, it seems high. But the ToughPad FZ-B2 is a fully rugged 7” tablet with an Android operating system and an MIL-STD-810G military-grade design. MooringTech also offers the Panasonic tablets in a 10” display with a Windows platform with a price point at $2,500. These tablets are designed to withstand every conceivable climate and most high-pressure situations that will arise in the line of duty for an emergency responder. They are also equipped with enough safety features to ensure that they are near-impenetrable, except by authorized users. This is where the men are separated from the boys in the world of tablet technology; the average and even the exceptional, offerings from consumer tablet makers are not equipped to go wherever their owners go.
On the software side of the budget issue, some companies have switched from traditional in-house servers to cloud-based subscription systems. They have figured out how to do so without compromising the security of the information being transferred over the remote server connection, and the cloud subscription comes at a fraction of the cost of the old servers and maintenance.
It is a hard and ugly truth, but the cost ceiling can only go so low right now. Even with cloud service, overhead includes server maintenance and IT support. For rugged devices and other field technology, a large part of the cost is the armor that makes it possible for tablets to go into the heat of a fire and on a search party in the snow without any effect on the quality of performance. Research is ongoing for lighter, more durable, and more cost-effective materials. But even as budgets recover, departments who remember the hard years are staying smart about making more with less.