Public Safety Signals

Today marks four years since Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans. While we have learned many lessons from that catastrophic disaster, there is always more work to do as a community and country, as we can never predict the nature or extent of the next emergent situation heading our way.
In fact, the new [...]

Ever have a “duh” moment? It seems to me the older I get, the more of those moments I have. I thought I would share my most recent “duh” moment with you, because it truly relates to public safety. If I do my part of acting on it, and you [...]

Capella University today announces the launch of its new School of Public Service Leadership. We believe that this school will help prepare our public service leaders to address some of the most pressing issues of our time. The school brings together faculty and learners in three key fields: public safety, public administration and health care. [...]

My father used to tell me “Son, … you can’t cure stupid.”, and the longer I am in this business, the more I have to agree with that statement. You would think the general public would learn from past disasters, but a recent report by Rice University claims that lessons learned during Hurricane Katrina were [...]

I was astonished when a nearby city of 60,000 decided not to hire their first emergency manager, sighting the economy as the reason. In an effort to convince the city manager he was making a mistake, I prepared a 30 page preliminary hazard analysis for this city manager. Unfortunately, I did not have enough unfettered [...]

A 2009 report released yesterday by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave the country’s critical infrastructure a cumulative grade of “D”. Critical infrastructure (CI) includes things like roads, bridges, dams, water and waste treatment plants, energy and aviation, to name just a few of the areas receiving very low marks.
This ASCE report also [...]

As the interdisciplinary nature of public safety continues to grow and mature I am seeing further development of academic honor societies developing as well. Capella has had a chapter of Alpha Phi Sigma (National Criminal Justice Honor Society) for a couple of years now. Jeff Godwin is the chapter president (please contact him with any [...]

We are just hours away from inaugurating a new President. While this inauguration will be perhaps the most historical ever, we must realize that the decisions made by President Obama will affect public safety. How much public safety will be affected is not known and most likely won’t be known for at last a year.
In [...]

Hello everyone, I just returned from the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) technology conference in San Diego. There were thousands of chiefs, commanders and law enforcement professionals from the U.S. and abroad. After my own 32 years in the field it is very encouraging seeing the high tech, information sharing and intelligence systems [...]

We have all watched with great interest as the current financial crisis has affected almost every aspect of our lives. From Wall Street to Main Street we have seen layoffs, firings, and a severe drop in the economy. Not only are we seeing people loose their homes, but landlords are loosing their rental properties, and [...]