Interview with Paul Steinberg, senior vice president, CTO, Motorola Solutions

Technology has already started to rapidly change the operational environment of the public safety community, and in particular law enforcement. In the US, as elsewhere around the world, the impact has been felt from smaller, rural offices to larger, urban departments. Wider changes such as social, environmental, political and economic are creating trends and developments that are influencing the future of crime and the strategies adopted to address criminal behavior. 

Motorola Solutions is a leading provider of advanced voice and data TETRA solutions to public safety users. The UK’s national Airwave Service network is built upon Motorola infrastructure, as is the Dutch public safety network, C2000. In Spain, Madrid’s regional network provides communications to public safety and local government services. Entering into 2014, Alex Preston, editor of TETRA Today, spoke exclusively to Paul Steinberg, senior vice president, chief technology officer, Motorola Solutions about the integral nature of wireless technology and solutions for law enforcement and the trends that will affect agencies and officers in the coming years.

Whilst the priorities for public safety agencies have remained constant – safety, efficiency and effectiveness that offer the best outcomes for society – it is the challenges faced that Steinberg believes are transforming the potential for public safety communication. In particular, he identifies broadband as both a disruptive and enabling technology. 

“The first challenge is to consistently meet the demands of doing more with less,” Steinberg says. “Although that has never not been not the case, it is certainly more acute now because of the technology transformation that is going on, and this creates the second challenge – complexity. It used to be that public safety communication was based upon mission critical voice, and this served well for decades and is still very, very important. However with the advent of broadband data and the complexities associated with applications, including security and all the data that is involved, this is posing a big challenge for agencies and officers alike in terms of how they control this kind of complexity.”

Steinberg continues: “In terms of technology, the public safety community can’t just use commercial technology in a standard way for everything that they do. First and foremost, there is a mission critical standard for performance and reliability and there are also privacy laws that have to be adhered to and agents have to maintain the integrity of data and the custody of evidence.”

In response Motorola launched the world´s first mission-critical imaging solution for frontline officers in March 2013 – a combination of the MTP6750 TETRA handheld radio (left) featuring an integrated five-megapixel camera and the Photograph and Intelligence Communications System (PICS) image management solution. As Steinberg explains, it is not just the integration of the camera, which makes it interesting; it is also the ability to manage the stored images with watermarking and assured coding to make sure the images are not tampered and the proof of this. Through PICS, images captured on the MTP6750 can be managed, authenticated and shared within a public safety organisation´s existing workflows, enabling verification of captured images at any point and reducing the chance of evidence being deemed unusable in a prosecution.

“It is the management of the data that is important,” Steinberg stresses. 

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