The program brought Fire and Rescue and the Sheriff’s Office onto one dispatch platform. The technology was the tractable half; the real work was getting two agencies with separate commands, separate cultures and separate elected accountability to accept a shared system for the most operationally sensitive thing either of them does, and to agree on whose rules governed it.
The criminal justice information boundary ran through the whole platform, separating CJI-bearing paths from general dispatch traffic end to end, with encrypted transport to Sheriff’s Office substations, dedicated CJI demilitarized zones, MACsec at the link layer and FIPS 140-2 validated cryptographic platforms throughout. The design was reviewed with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and carried through thirty-five revisions.
The firewall pair at that boundary was not a design preference. The criminal justice local agency security officer would not recommend the dispatch platform for implementation without the second pair of firewalls at the boundary, which settled the question faster than any internal argument would have.
The reverse case is equally instructive. When a proposal was raised to remove those firewalls at the Sheriff’s Office and have the switches perform link-layer encryption in their place, it went to the same regulator rather than being decided internally. A criminal justice boundary is negotiated in network design terms with somebody outside your organization on the other side of the table, and the design that survives is the one they are willing to sign.
Built for continuous availability across two sites — a primary at the main data center and a geographically separate backup with replication between them — extending out to fire stations, Sheriff’s Office substations and mobile units in the field. A dispatch system has no maintenance window and no acceptable outage: it is the one platform where degraded means somebody waits longer for an ambulance.
Outcome
Response times reduced from five to ten minutes to one to two. The minutes came out of the handoffs between the agencies.