By Acting Chief Eric Watson
When I built Chicopee’s Real-Time Information Center, I designed it with the expectation that it would eventually serve more than one agency. What I didn’t know was how neighboring departments would become part of it.
Chicopee, Massachusetts, sits at the intersection of Interstate 90 and Interstate 91, known as the Crossroads of New England. An incident that starts in our city can cross three or four jurisdictions in the time it takes to run a license plate. So the operational case for building something regional was never abstract. Massachusetts has 351 cities and towns, the average one barely more than 20 square miles, most with their own police department, and none of us can afford to duplicate every specialized capability modern public safety requires. I understood that going in.
What I didn’t understand was the mechanism. If you had asked me on day one what would eventually bring a neighboring department, a sheriff’s office or a task force to route work through a center they didn’t own, I would have told you it would take deliberate outreach on our part — the ordinary work of building regional relationships over time. I understood the geography. I understood the operational need. What I didn’t yet have was a theory of how that invitation would actually happen.
The plan I had
The center was designed around three mission functions:
- Real-time support for officer and community safety
- Investigative support for patrol officers and detectives
- Crime analysis focused on active patterns.
It integrated the tools most departments have some version of — camera feeds, license plate readers and records systems — and placed a small team of analysts and operators at the seam between them so information could become action during the same shift instead of two weeks later.
That was the local case. The regional case was simply an extension of it. If a stolen vehicle connected to a homicide crosses three towns, whichever department is looking at it now needs the same picture the originating agency should have had an hour earlier.
I built for both from the start. What I had not yet built was the specific path partners would take to get there.
What I expected — and what I didn’t
We always planned to bring partners in. What we didn’t know was how that would actually happen.
Anyone who has tried to build cooperation across independent agencies knows the general shape of that challenge. Chiefs don’t commit their people to another agency’s platform because of a good presentation. Even where trust is high and relationships are strong, participation costs something: attention, training and a policy decision someone must defend to their own city or county. We expected bringing partners in would require sustained effort on our part — the normal work of building regional relationships over time.
What we didn’t expect was the form those relationships would eventually take once the center’s value became real enough for other agencies to see for themselves.
What actually happened
The center started with our own department, which was the right place to begin. Patrol used it. Detectives used it. Command staff used it. Incidents moved faster, and investigations started earlier. Once that pattern took hold, our own people began expecting the center to be part of how work got done, and I no longer had to explain its value internally.
Then a partner arrived that we hadn’t specifically pursued: a county sheriff’s office.
They didn’t come asking what the center could do for them. They came offering their own regional reach, wanting to help make the center more than it already was. They understood something we already believed: Our community couldn’t truly be safe if our region wasn’t. That shared understanding, more than any presentation or sales pitch either of us could have made, is what got the partnership moving.
The sheriff’s office
What grew out of that conversation went further than I expected, and it worked in both directions.
The sheriff’s office gave us access to its jail management system and other data sources, which we aggregated with our own information to create a more complete picture than either of us could have built alone.
They also offered to help pay for a radio upgrade — new consoles tied into our regional dispatch center’s existing radio system. That gave us access to additional regional channels without either agency paying to build the same capability twice. Building onto infrastructure that already existed instead of creating our own saved real money and left room to bring additional partner agencies into the system the same way later.
The sheriff’s office also helped fund a workflow and communications system that streamlined how requests for information, BOLOs and identification requests move among regional departments, including its own.
In return, we run intelligence packages against the sheriff’s office’s own caseload, including evictions, summonses and related civil paperwork. The new systems have made that work far more efficient than it used to be.
Neither side is simply a data source for the other. Both agencies perform analytical work that supports the other. That’s a very different relationship than one agency granting access while the other consumes it.
The neighboring city
The pattern held elsewhere, although it never looked exactly the same twice.
A neighboring city agreed to place an analyst inside our center. He left the position before we could do much meaningful work together and before the memorandum of understanding was finalized. That could have been the end of the partnership.
Instead, we’re now in the process of finding his replacement. The MOU is ready to be signed as we move forward, and we’re separately working through how to bring the city’s data into one of our aggregation platforms so we can synthesize what each of us sees.
An unfinished partnership is still a partnership, as long as both sides continue building toward it.
Federal partners
Federal task force partners also offered us access to their own data and systems.
In return, we support their investigations through the same reciprocal model that embedded task force analyst relationships are built on elsewhere in the profession: access flows one way, investigative support flows back the other, and each side becomes genuinely dependent on what the other brings.
NESPIN
NESPIN — the New England State Police Information Network and our regional intelligence-sharing network — integrated with the center in a way that added real deconfliction value. Instead of discovering overlapping operations after the fact, we began identifying them before they became officer safety problems.
That work has grown significantly. Today, we’re the 30th RISSafe Watch Center in the country, and our deconfliction volume has increased from roughly 40 events entered during an entire previous year to well over 400 events in just a four-month span this year.
None of these partners were recruited in the traditional sense. Each either came to us — or continued building toward something that wasn’t yet finished — because the value was already visible. Whether they brought data, funding, operational reach or simply the willingness to keep moving after an early setback, they saw something worth investing in.
What that taught me
I had spent years thinking about regionalization as a persuasion problem. It turned out to be a capability problem.
Persuasion assumes people don’t participate because they haven’t been asked the right way, aren’t ready to be convinced or don’t understand what they’re missing. Many regional initiatives begin with that assumption. Quite a few stall. The signing ceremony happens, but months later participation remains thin.
Capability points somewhere different. It says people participate because participation makes their own work easier — not simply the region’s work or the abstract idea of regional collaboration, but their own work on Monday morning.
If it does that, agencies come without being pulled, and they keep participating even when a specific effort stalls, the way the neighboring city’s partnership briefly did. If it doesn’t, no amount of persuasion gets them there.
What I spent years expecting to have to convince agencies to do, the value accomplished on its own.
What a chief starting something similar should know
A few practical lessons stand out from what I’d tell another chief considering a similar investment — including one I never expected to be writing.
Prove value with the people closest to the work first.
Regional partnerships are built on local credibility. If your own patrol officers aren’t calling the center, no neighboring department will either. Establish that internal pattern before you start looking outward.
You don’t need a full-time hire to start building regional staffing capacity.
A partial salary arrangement, or embedding one of your people inside a partner’s center — the way the sheriff’s office and the neighboring city have each worked toward with us — can create meaningful regional capacity without waiting for a budget line that may never come.
Look first at what you already have before focusing on what you think you need to buy. We’re already in discussions with other communities about expanding this model further, and the funding is following the same pattern rather than depending on a single line item. Our regional homeland security office recently included us in a grant designed to improve information sharing across the region.
Put governance in place before you need it.
Define what you’re willing to share, under what rules and with what oversight. Do it while the questions are still hypothetical, because once a partner arrives with a real request, the pressure to improvise becomes enormous. Improvised access is where problems begin. Governance doesn’t have to be complicated at the outset, but it does have to exist.
Technology can accelerate trust. It rarely creates it.
The strongest regional relationships I’ve built came from working together successfully over time, not from a platform or a data-sharing agreement. A platform without trust behind it simply becomes another silo with a nicer interface. Regional trust is built one successful operation at a time. There isn’t a shortcut.
Watch behavior, not signatures.
A signed memorandum tells you an agency has agreed to something in principle. Repeat use, voluntary contributions and reciprocal information sharing tell you whether the partnership is actually working.
In the first year of any partnership, those behavioral signals are far more valuable than the paperwork.
I also wish I’d expected more of the relationships to be reciprocal from the beginning. I assumed we’d primarily be providing value to smaller partners. Instead, just as often, they strengthened us first. Their data and their funding arrived before we’d asked for either, and both made our center stronger than I had anticipated.
Expect some of it not to go according to plan — and build anyway.
The neighboring city’s analyst leaving before we finalized the paperwork could have looked like a partnership that failed. It wasn’t.
Build for the region from the beginning, but stay open to discovering how partnerships will actually develop. Stay willing to keep building even when the first version of a partnership doesn’t survive contact with reality.
The bigger lesson
I built the center intending to regionalize it, and that intention shaped every early decision. What I hadn’t mapped out was the path those partnerships would take. More than once, they developed in ways I never would have predicted.
That experience changed the way I think about regional collaboration.
I had assumed regionalization was something you created through outreach, presentations and carefully planned partnerships. Instead, I learned that it grows out of operational value. If the center doesn’t prove itself to your own officers first, no amount of planning or persuasion will bring neighboring agencies to the table. And if one partnership encounters an early setback, it doesn’t mean the model has failed. It simply means relationships take time to develop.
As those relationships grow, they begin reinforcing one another. Data sharing leads to better intelligence. Shared funding expands capabilities. Reciprocal support builds trust. Together, those partnerships make every participating agency more effective than it could be working alone.
That’s the lesson I would share with any chief considering a similar investment. You can design for the region, but you can’t script how it grows. Build something that delivers real value every day. If you do, agencies won’t become partners because you convinced them to. They’ll become partners because the capability makes their own work better.
That’s how a local investment becomes a regional one.
About the author
Eric Watson is the acting chief of police, deputy chief and chief technology officer for the Chicopee (Mass.) Police Department, where he founded the department’s Real-Time Information Center. He also serves as Northeast regional director for the National Real-Time Crime Center Association.
