The programme 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 demilitarised 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.
Built for continuous availability across two sites — a primary at the main data centre 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.