Oracle announced a cloud-native platform last month to aid first responders and law enforcement with real-time information assessment and objective decision making. The suite of services added public safety to the list of public-sector system upgrades becoming possible through the adoption of 5G and cloud-native technology.

The suite includes several upgraded communication systems for first responders and particularly law enforcement, including officer-worn communication and camera systems that activate automatically through dispatch to record interactions between law enforcement and the public with a goal of bringing more “transparency, trust, and accountability” into those scenarios, Oracle noted.

“We wanted to take the opportunity to say, listen, we've just moved into this cloud-native, 5G world, let's not just repurpose stuff so that you end up with a platform like all the other providers that have been in the market for the last 25 years. There's no benefit to that," Oracle VP Andrew De La Torre told SDxCentral, explaining that developing the suite "was very much a case of us going from the ground up and really starting with a proper microservice, containerized architecture."

Oracle SVP Steve Seaone added that “if you bring detachment to emotional interactions, you tend to get better outcomes,” and “being able to do that at scale through technology on the day-to-day events” is the ultimate goal of the tech suite.

These day-to-day incidents, “that's where things go sideways, and it frankly, throws the whole country into a crisis,” Seaone said. While first responders are also a major priority, Seaone explained aiding law enforcement with making detached, diffusion-based decisions through “a blended-team environment” can lead to very different outcomes in policing.

According to Seaone, public safety agencies – especially small-to-mid sized agencies – have historically been using technology that is “largely on-prem, written 20 years ago, their upgrade cycles are slow, fraught with challenges when they do upgrade, and so you wind up with kind of fragile, old code bases that don't support some of the things you might be able to do or suspect that they can do.”

“It's only really now the cloud has become the common fabric that sits underneath all of this stuff, particularly with 5G being cloud-native,” De La Torre added. “So I think it's a prescient moment in time from that perspective as well … the technology finally is in a place where you can do a properly converged, integrated solution.”

Seaone says the conversation around adopting different public-safety divisions into the cloud has changed over the years.

“When I originally started in public safety, five or six years ago, it was like, ‘well, I know that everybody else is on the cloud, but public safety will never go to the cloud.’ And then it felt like six months later was, ‘well [records management services] will go to [the] cloud but not CAD [computer-aided dispatch]. CAD [requires] response in real time.”

“That change went from, ‘I'm not going to consider anything in the cloud’ to ‘I will only consider things in the cloud.’ And that happened, really, over the last three years,” he continued.

The team has been on the project for the last two years, according to Seaone, “and in that time we've actually had to hire a whole team and stand everything up from scratch. And we're already out talking about it in [the] market and talking about how we can take it to folks live now."

“What was interesting, though," De La Torre added, was "a lot of the use cases that we started to build for were a bit more generic IoT, right, which was sensorizing things. Steve and the team were the first ones that actually suddenly came in and said, 'but we need media, we need real-time media streaming.' And so that was actually a bit of a bolt-on, which threw us a curveball at some point.”

Proving cloud-enabled, real-time services has been the critical piece in seeing its adoption welcomed in by the public safety and law enforcement body as well.

"There's a little bit of a pinch-me moment they go through, so they're skeptical until you can show them it working in real-time,” Seaone explained. “These are folks that are skeptical for a living because they get lied to for a living."

But demonstrating how far the tech has come often melts that away. “It's five sensors on top of the vehicle, an officer wearing a body-worn camera differently, a helmet cam, and then another camera and a sensor on somebody's wrist telling whether or not they're still up and moving … being able to see all that integration actually working and not being just a white paper proof-of-concept – it's working code.”