Public Safety

Fire and emergency medical services (EMS) agencies handle a multitude of incidents that claim lives, destroy property, damage the environment, prompt evacuations, and impact localities. The increasing call load and the resultant response and recovery operations from more complex events strain municipal budgets. GIS helps agencies perform data collection, analysis, operations support, and resource coordination during risk reduction, prevention, and fire suppression operations to support a more resilient community. 

Agencies strive to implement mitigation projects that can reduce the impact and overall wildfire risk on communities, but limited resources and sparse funding make this a challenge. GIS helps agencies identify and prioritize areas of high risk, effective locations for treatments, defensible space, and at-risk populations to justify and allocate resources more equitably. During recovery, GIS helps document the impacts and assess postfire risks such as flooding, landslides, and debris flows to clearly define the need for funding.

Many jurisdictions are seeing rising incidents of crime and disorder, yet police agencies are challenged by the lack of funding, personnel, and resources needed to implement evidence-based policing strategies. GIS helps agencies modernize and improve field operations, understand crime patterns and implement new crime control strategies, become more transparent and accountable, respond to public health emergencies such as the opioid epidemic and homelessness, and increase overall efficiencies.

With the growing demand for improved location data accuracy, GIS has never been more critical for 911. Addressing authorities use GIS to collect, validate, and manage mission-critical address data in three dimensions. With GIS, Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) are better equipped to understand where to route responders in the community and even within a building in real time, ensuring that resources are deployed where they are needed most.

Communities face ever-evolving threats from foreign and domestic actors that place people and critical infrastructure at risk. GIS provides agencies with the tools needed to conduct risk assessments, monitor real-time threat information, coordinate field operations, and securely share information between partners and jurisdictions. With GIS, homeland security professionals can better map, visualize, and analyze suspicious activity and then take steps to protect the community.