Public safety organizations are limited in their ability to communicate and share information with other agencies even though they have the technology in place to do so within their own boundaries. The goal of this research is to help agencies realize the value of joining together to design, develop and deploy information and communications technologies to support policing, criminal justice, public safety and homeland security. In this research, we pursue two main questions about cross-agency communications and information sharing:

1. Why do public safety collaborations occur in some places and not others?
2. What makes public safety collaboration successful?

In order to answer these questions, we are pursuing both theoretical and empirical paths. Our theoretical contributions to date include the identification of the major forms of public safety networks, and contrasting theoretical explanations regarding design decisions for both collaboration infrastructure and governance, focusing on institutional and rational choice theories.

On the empirical front, we have developed a state-by-state data set of public safety networks. Currently, we have identified 75 initiatives across 44 states. We have gathered data on 30 attributes of each initiative, as well as over 40 independent variables for each of the 50 states, which include public safety, police/justice and computing issues. Other accomplishments to date include significant progress on three case studies (CapWIN, JNET and ARJIS) and identification of other collaborations for additional in-depth study. This figure demonstrates the range of issues that is addressed in this study.

We have created this website to be a central point from which we can disseminate our findings, provide links to and commentary on topically relevant resources on the web, and make connections with members of the professional, policy, and academic communities who are interested in public safety networks.