Rural First | Sheriffs

How first responders can gain transparency in day to day operations

ambulance saving lives The challenges faced by the first response community in today’s environment of increasing drug use, of having to protect more homes and families with fewer dollars and shrinking workforce can be daunting. Thankfully, real-time remote monitoring solutions offer visibility into what’s going on when you’re not there. When managing a mobile workforce and remote assets, you need a tool, which allows you to keep tabs on all assets and personal in real time, without making a significant impact on the bottom line.

When you’re running a sheriff’s office, police station or first responders dispatch center, tracking assets, people, and places can quickly become an overwhelming task. Operating that new patrol car becomes a significant expense for any law enforcement agency, especially with the threat of rising fuel prices and expensive parts. Remote asset management with real-time information is the solution that lets you collect current information about your cars, ambulances, fire trucks, and virtually anything else used in emergency services – engine and oil temperature, flow rates, RPM, mileage, location – all increasing visibility, transparency, and control for a smoother operation. All this while you remain at home, or even on vacation in Mumbai.

There are many benefits of real-time awareness, but these advantages all lead to one important factor: actionable data. Giving you the power at your fingertips to act lightning fast, and knowledgeable, as issues arise and decisions demand to be made. These gains don’t just come to law enforcement and emergency responders. They bring improvements to all county services. Perks like:

Visual knowledge of fleet location.
Streamlined daily actions are requiring fewer resources.
A collection of data from any and all locations for analysis.
Better centralized operations.
More transparency from all county services maintaining safety and efficiency.
Know exact locations of all assets for theft-prevention, security, and visibility.

As the Internet of Things (IoT) evolves, technology is no longer just creating a solution with a singular task. Go ask Alexa to find out for yourself, and then come back. The technology is unfolding into modifying the end user’s behaviors and watching over activities to influence those actions. Smart solutions, like the one’s found in GPS tracking and fleet management, has grown from simply tracking the locations of vehicles out in the field.

Free white paper on improvements to driver safety with in-vehicle GPS.

Today’s solutions, whether for the government, business, and first responders, is also keeping watch for activities and behaviors that can put drivers, departments, enterprises and their reputations at risk. Think of these solutions as driver monitoring systems promoting safe driving, inter-departmental transparency, and a way to introduce a new level of value-added services to customers, protections for employees, and benefits to you.

The goal is clear when it comes to keeping companies secure and profitable through creating a safer environment for driver’s, deputies, or emergency medical personnel and GPS tracking solutions are the easiest and most efficient way to attain that goal. Composed of high-tech CalAmp fleet tracking devices, hardwired into vehicle systems and a dynamic dashboard for careful centralized team management. GPS devices, like industry-leading CalAmp devices, progressively collect raw data of all your vehicles, like, as mentioned earlier, driving behaviors like hard braking, rapid acceleration, and speeding, and then relay the information to your office or department.

The minute-by-minute location, performance, and maintenance data on each vehicle, and it’s driver, is a comprehensive and inclusive solution that is one large part of the IoT, bringing weekly driver activity, identifying risk behaviors and improving overall satisfaction amongst staff.

It’s easy. When you know what’s happening in the field, you can ensure everyone is focused on safety and your team can find new avenues to optimize routes and schedules and streamline operations.

The Problem With Rural American Roadways

Rural American Roadways
America is covered by over 4 million miles of road, and 3 million of it is rural and small town routes. In addition, only 130,000 miles are under the jurisdiction of the federal government, this leaves 97% of all roads in the U.S. being managed by state and local governments. Factoring in that 65.4% of roads are paved, and the rest unpaved, and roads are often created based less on planning and more on personal interest, new and freshly paved roads will often lead to poor mapping and road systems in many rural counties. This is unfortunate because rural America is the leading provider in the U.S. for food, raw materials and manufactured products.

The United States land area amasses 3.6 million square miles, and when 97% of that is designated as rural or small town, we have an obligation to improve mapping in these locations.

Rural Mapping Issues & First Responders

These poor mapping and road planning issues have more than just an effect on moving America’s resources. It also has a major impact on the response time, and even the arrival of emergency services like police officers, sheriff deputies, EMT’s, ambulance crews and fire departments. Sadly, although it is known that these delays are great in number, it is extremely hard to pinpoint the exact amount because most cities, towns, counties and states do not measure performance in regards to overall response time. The information that is available does make it clear that something must be done. If a patient is transported to a hospital within 15 minutes of having cardiac arrest by ambulance they have a 6% chance of survival, reducing the time to 8 minutes increases this to 8% and lowering it to 5 minutes increases the number to 10-11%.

Counties In Need

One solution to the problem, other than a better plan for roadways, is manual GIS map correction by a trained GIS expert. GIS stands for geographic information system, and these experts go through and capture, store, manipulate, analyze, and manage geographical data. In this case, they make sure that what is on the map matches the roads in any given county. Take for example, the GIS experts at Rural First that take select data from each county and then verify that data against county records and other pieces of information to get the most accurate maps available. And like the solutions at Rural First, without a strong GPS software solution that utilizes this new data provided by the GIS experts, counties cannot use the level of accuracy they are provided. Working in tandem, response time is greatly reduced, insuring budgets are kept under control, time is better managed, and most importantly, more lives are saved.

Want to learn more about the GIS experts at Rural First? Watch this informational video by our own sales expert, Jeremy Smart or request a free demonstration.

911 and the Difficulties That Have Arisen

This past Sunday, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, a comedy news show on HBO, discussed a problem that Rural First has been speaking to since our inception. Emergency call centers and first responders are in desperate need of funding and new GPS tracking/GIS mapping technology. The United States makes over 240 million 911 calls every year, and the system breaks down often enough to take notice.

Like this story of GPS and GIS issues affecting 911 operators first reported by CBS46 in Atlanta, GA.

The pond Shanell Anderson drove into.

Shanell Anderson, 31, of Atlanta, GA who lost control of her SUV and drove into a local pond while delivering newspapers around 4:15 a.m. one morning. In the released 911 call, Anderson was initially calm as she told the dispatcher she was sinking into the pond while inside her vehicle. The dispatcher repeatedly asked Anderson for an address, telling the woman the information she was giving couldn’t been found in the system. Anderson attempted to repeat her location several times, each time with a more urgent tone, before finally being disconnected with the dispatcher.

After the original 911 call, the dispatcher placed another call to an unknown official, and the two worked together to try to locate the woman. In the second call, the dispatcher advised that she had already sent emergency crews to several areas with water as they tried to locate the woman.

This problem seems to be a surprisingly growing issue as GPS technology and GIS map correction for 911 departments lags behind other private entities. This is why Rural First provides affordable solutions to rural counties that otherwise could not afford them. You can watch the full episode of Last Week Tonight and the problems faced by 911 operators below.

*The following video from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) does have very coarse language. If you are easily offended, it is recommended you don’t watch.

What Can Happen in 5 1/2 Minutes

5.5 minutes is the average time it takes to check one’s voicemail. Take out the trash. Pay a bill online. And 5.5 minutes is the average length of a high speed chase in the United States. A great deal of situations, both good and bad, can occur in 5.5 minutes, from suspects apprehended without incident, to lives lost from major collisions. It is estimated that 1/3 of all pursuits end in a crash, with 10,000 people injured yearly, and killing 6301 suspects, 140 officers, and 2456 bystanders since the 90’s.

With these staggering numbers, make sure your department has the peace of mind it deserves by keeping informed and updated with the best in class tools supplied by Rural First GPS tracking.

While other GPS tracking solutions compete in the market with bottom of the basement pricing, most update the data of vehicles on the road every 5 minutes, losing the precious information between the beginning of a pursuit and final moments.

Don’t spend your money on a product that has the same amount of data you could get before you had a solution to begin with.

Rural First’s second by second mapping updates, with our patented HALO system, is the only solution that will show everything you need, from the pursuit vehicles idle time to the constant fluctuations of speed that occur during all pursuits.

This feature is a proven benefit of Rural First as multiple sheriff, police and highway patrol that currently use our GPS solutions find the information a life saver both in maintaining department vehicles and as evidence in court cases.

With Rural First’s easy to use and even easier to read layout, your department will know immediately all the details in all situations. Unlike most GPS tracking solutions on the market.

Rural First does not over-complicate our software with unwieldy charts, graphs and diagrams.

We give you the cleanest layout with only the information you need to keep your department running effectively.

But Rural First is not just great for high speed pursuits, but everything your officers do daily, as our informative and customizable HALO system gives the status of all your vehicles, whether they are patrolling an area, sitting idle or coming back from a location.

In addition, Rural First GPS solutions and HALO system is also a great product for government agencies that manage any vehicles including snow plows, mowers, and equipment, keeping you in-the-know on what your employees are doing or if your vehicle is being tampered with.

Visit ruralfirst.com or call to setup a demonstration to see what Rural First can do for you, after all, a great deal of situations can occur in 5.5 minutes.

Mapping: The Solution and The Advantage On Sheriff Departments

Most digital mapping errors begin with human hands. Whether from being overlooked to just plain laziness, these errors have a great impact on many sheriff departments when time is of the utmost importance to get to an emergency, and when you factor in a rural location with fewer routes to an area these errors have even greater impact. That is why at Rural First, we spend a great deal of time evolving suitable strategies to reduce these errors.

Because all maps at Rural First start with local data retrieved from county maps, our first step is to perform an assessment to find how accurate the current mapping is. This assessment creates the baseline from which all our corrections will be made. In combination with digital mapping already available, we evaluate and compare discovering incorrect information.

And then the real work begins.

With our team of GIS mapping experts, these mapping errors are carefully fixed. Corrections are then evaluated by a team lead to insure they are true. The team lead then either approves the corrections, or sent back to our team of experts for further research. Not only does our expert map correction make Rural First a leader in the GPS tracking and solutions market, but out best practices approach to map correction sets us above and beyond the competition.

But because Rural First is an industry leader, our maps are Living Maps that our experts constantly return to update, correct and grow. Routes change, roads are added, highways moved, and Rural First makes sure that you are the first know, so you always make it to an emergency as quickly as possible.

The Golden Hour: The 60 Minute Difference Between Life and Death.

It was only a few years ago that the founder of Rural First, Rob Woolsey, was forced to grieve the loss of his mother. Due to inaccurate GIS mapping, First Responders were unable to arrive in time to save her life. Unless you are personally affected like Robb, or a first responder serving a rural area, you might not realize the difference a strong and efficient GPS tracking solution like Rural First can make when it comes to public safety.

At Rural First, we believe that GPS tracking solutions are so much more than just a route mapping tool. Our product gives you complete information about your fleet at a glance. Rural First places great emphasis on situational awareness, ensuring that emergency response vehicles are able to respond to calls immediately and arrive on-time. With our accurate mapping data, you will not only be able to effectively route your First Responders to call locations, but you will see the exact location and state of each vehicle, siren and light activity, and vehicle fuel and maintenance status. You’ll be at peak performance, on-time, every time.

The US National Library of Medicine notes that: “morbidity and mortality are affected if care is not instituted within the first hour after injury”. Emergency responders refer to this time period as the ‘Golden Hour.’ It is described as the time between receiving a call, locating a vehicle, dispatching the team, and arriving on the scene. First Responders, the Golden Hour can be the difference between life and death. We have found this to be true time and time again. In the case of Robb’s mother, the EMT should have arrived within 6 minutes of the phone call.

However, due to inaccurate directions, it took them 45 minutes to arrive. In fact, as Mrs. Woolsey was fighting to breathe, the ambulance sped past her home. By providing the most accurate routing and mapping information, ensuring that the closest unit is dispatched, and ensuring that EMTs receive correct turn-by-turn directions, Rural First has significantly increased the odds of reaching the call within the golden hour.

Route navigation for emergency response vehicles is a matter of life and death in many situations. A few years ago I took a trip to the ER by ambulance. I was at home and feeling faint, luckily I turned out to be ok. While we were speeding to the hospital I remember thinking, why on earth are they taking the longest route possible? Are they not from here? Do they have to follow very specific directions given to them by dispatch? Despite my unwelcome attempts to assist with their driving from the gurney, we arrived 7 minutes later than necessary.

Dispatchers using GPS tracking solutions can ensure that first response drivers are not only taking the quickest routes to their emergency calls but the safest routes as well. By being able to determine whether a route is taking first responders thru an area where there are one-ways or road closures, valuable minutes can now be spent saving lives. Our goal at Rural First is to decrease dispatch times to emergency calls, save more lives, and ensure the safety of First Responders and the communities they serve.

What GPS Tracking Can Do

Every morning my loving husband points out the money I’m throwing out the window by starting my vehicle before I get ready, and I have to say this is one of the few times he is right. When it comes to construction sites, were not talking about one wife, were talking about 30 vehicles guzzling fuel. The driver is innocently thinking that it won’t hurt anything, he’s just running in to grab a Dew and Donut, or stopping by to grab a ladder. But these innocent stops turn into a huge fuel guzzler. You probably don’t even want to know how much it is increasing the wear and tear on your engines. With our Idling alert, you will be able to put a nail in this problem, and re-train your drivers to turn vehicles off when not in use.

For construction companies, finding ways to cut costs and improve income is always a top priority. Yet management often loses control over vehicle and equipment fleet costs. Rural First will help guide you back into the driver’s seat of your budget, and give you the tools to better manage your fleet. With our GPS tracking system in place you can cut fuel costs, vehicle wear, and maintenance costs, while improving billing accuracy. You will also be able to better protect your assets and lower your exposure to theft. Anything from unapproved use on the job site, or personal trips being made with work trucks. With more money going out than coming in, you cannot afford to pay for your employees personal rendezvous. You cut them a check every Friday for that. Aside from bulldozing through your fuel budget, it increases your fleets liability. Rural First will give you the tools to protect your fleet, with personalized alerts sent straight to your phone when a unit is not following protocol.

I know it’s hard to imagine, but GPS tracking can actually reduce maintenance costs. Now that you have put a stop to excessive idling and unauthorized use, you will see less vehicle damage and fewer miles driven which turns into less maintenance. This is not the only way Maintenance costs drop. With the Rural First system in place. you will be able to set up automatic maintenance notifications. I have a device in my car and this is one of my favorite features because like most people I put it at the bottom of my to-do list. With automatic notifications, you won’t have to put it on a list at all, and your vehicles will live longer, healthier lives. Which means you will have to spend less on fixing, and replacing them.

It’s been a long hot day and your worker leaves the truck idling and air conditioner blowing as he runs in the quick trip for a Big Gulp. What he doesn’t see is the guy standing by the pay phone looking lost. Instead, he sees the back of the truck as its screeching out of the parking lot. At one time this would have been a huge loss for you, but not anymore, because you have installed Rural First GPS tracking you know exactly where this stolen truck is. Being able to see the vehicle is not the only benefit. You will also be able to send a starter disable command to the unit, so that once they shut-off the vehicle, it will not restart. You will now be able to recover your property safely without a high-speed police chase that results in nothing. An added benefit of this is that insurance companies often offer reduced premiums to fleets that use GPS tracking.

When it comes to billing your customers, you should be as accurate as possible. The Rural First system will not only aid with this, it can seamlessly connect with your accounting software. You will be able to pull or schedule a report showing you where your equipment and team have been, enabling you to bill down to the minute. You will also be able to put settings in place that tell you how much time your crew spent at a prevailing wage site, making it easier to add up your employee hours and eliminating over reporting of prevailing wage hours.

Get Your Profits Back

Recently, we met with the owner of a construction company, battling some pretty significant timecard issues. He was struggling with employee time cards that were showing 80% of their hours as prevailing wage. He knew for a fact that the prevailing wage hours should be averaging no more than 50% of the work. With the company paying close to $15 more per hour for prevailing wage, he knew something had to be done.

Rural First was able to provide a unique yet simple solution. Employees are now automatically clocked into prevailing wage when they enter the site and then returned to their regular hourly wage the moment they exit the job site. With the ability to build a virtual geofence around the prevailing wage site, the workers are now paid down to the second for the time they spent on a prevailing wage job.

If you are still having your employees report time on a sheet of paper they turn in, then you are most definitely leaving a lot of cash on the table. With today’s advances in technology, this process has been streamlined.

Construction companies, along with many other commercial enterprises often battle over reporting of hours. Even if it’s not intentional. Small “fudging” of hours adds up. Let’s say the employee worked from 8:17 am to 4:36 pm, but logged it as 8 am to 5 pm. That’s almost an hour being reported that was not worked. This can add up very quickly.

Many contractors loathe payroll, and the shuffling of time sheets. A good time and attendance system can end those headaches. You may not care if a good worker arrives a little late as long as the work gets done. But if you saw the actual, factual totals, you’d be shocked by how many work hours you’re losing each week to fudging and rounding.

The American Payroll Association states that as much as 8% of total payroll costs are lost due to errors in the recording of hours worked, employee theft, and time spent by payroll/admin staff gathering and calculating time cards. And these numbers go up with mobile employees keeping their own time manually. That is equal to 38.4 minutes per 8 hour day. At $20 per hour, that equates to $3200 per year per employee or $64,000 per year for 20 employees.

How much can we save you? Let me show you what this can mean for you when you switch from paper time sheets to a web-based time tracking system such as Rural First. Your labor costs will shrink by 5% or more. Take your monthly payroll, multiply by 5%, then multiply that by 12, and those are very conservative numbers.

With our RFID feature, employee time is easily tracked, and time cards are a thing of the past. Essentially it is an onsite time clock. Each employee will have a key fob that they swipe in the vehicle, recording their hours on site down to the minute. Not only does it cut down on over reporting. But you will no longer be spending money on man hours for someone to go thru handwritten time sheets, and try to make sense of them. The RFID time clock feature and Geofence ability are just 2 ways of many that Rural First can make a difference in the way you do business. We offer the correct turn by turn directions, reports, alerts, maintenance, and tracking.

The American Rural Mapping Initiative

As you may or may not know, 97% of the country is classified as small town rural America. And the current commercial mapping in those areas is incredibly inaccurate. Many of the address points, especially residential do not exist, and the street names in the maps do not match the street names on the road signs. In order for the American Rural Mapping Initiative to be successful and provide first responders with the accurate data, they need to arrive on scene quicker and save more lives we need your local data. To date, we have worked with and mapped 128 counties throughout the states of Arkansas, Illinois, Kansas, and Missouri. The tracking and routing services utilized by our First Responders through the RuralFirst web map application relies heavily on accurate road centerlines with address ranges and 9-1-1 address points.

Please contact us if you are able to provide any mapping data for your county, so that we can better serve the First Responders in your area.

New Technology: Solution for the Rising Costs of Sheriff Offices

Rural policing is no longer Mayberry, and maybe it never was. Rural Sheriff’s deputies face more stress related to their personal safety and security accompanied by an increased demand for their services. Although urban police officers may have a backup available to them within minutes, in rural areas it can often take up to an hour for an adequate response if one at all. In most rural areas there simply isn’t enough funding to provide the adequate amount of officers to handle the increase in demand and territory.

“Like their city police colleagues, many of our nation’s elected sheriffs preside over far-stretching jurisdictions with limited resources. Crime-free rural patrol is the picture conjured up by the sheriffs of the media, such as Mayberry’s Andy Griffith, but the reality is far from the folklore.” -Dr. Richard Weinblatt

The available manpower in rural areas is vastly different than big cities, with only a few part-time employees representing the smallest and mostly rural located agencies. Limited manpower is only one of the obstacles rural sheriffs are facing, they are also seeing increased need for patrol. In reality,

he time for general patrol is rapidly dwindling in the face of increased calls for service without a commensurate deputy increase.

With technology’s rapid expansion, there are new apps introduced every day that could help Rural law enforcement better utilize the manpower they do have. The great thing about apps is that they can be very inexpensive if not free, enabling Rural law enforcement to make a real difference with minimal cost. With apps such as , the same officer can answer the call, gather evidence by capturing pictures and videos, and manage the case. It streamlines the process and cuts down on man hours. Another efficient app is iPatrol. By providing the officer with the ability to do information queries from the field, It eliminates time spent contacting dispatch and waiting for a response.

It would be a mistake to label the work of Sheriff’s Offices as strictly law enforcement because their duties go far beyond enforcing the law, It would be more accurate to describe their work as policing. In many rural areas and small towns, law enforcement is often, the only social service agency available around the clock 365 days a year.

They may be called on to deal with problems, that in urban areas would be handled by other agencies. For example, some small town Sheriff’s duties have included everything from putting up Christmas lights, to checking on chemicals in the water treatment plant. In essence, rural officers are expected to do more with less. With limited funds, hiring more help is often not possible. Turning to technology can be more cost effective and help relieve officers of some of their duties. While drone technology has seemed like science fiction for use by local law enforcement, commercialization has brought more UAVs to market—making such eyes-in-the-sky an invaluable tool for law enforcement. Depending on the payload, UAVs can cover a wide area more quickly than a patrol officer on foot. When combined with GPS Tracking you are able to see your UAV on the same screen as all of your officers, allowing you monitor the entire incident in near real-time.

With the state of the economy and financial issues, municipal funding is being cut. When you add a problem like shrinking budgets, to an increased demand for policing services and limited manpower, the policing problem in rural areas explodes. With fewer funds and soaring stress levels, people start cutting line items from their budgets. But new technologies such as GPS tracking costs very little, decrease operating costs and increase efficiencies to the point of saving jobs.

Sheriff Kevin Bond of Pettis County Missouri on Rural First GPS tracking; “The Sprocket system is more robust than any other system I have had the opportunity to see, and it is designed for emergency services”.

Without the appropriate manpower or funding to cover growing territories and populations, sheriff’s struggle to keep the morale high. Armed with a great sense of responsibility for their community and deputies, Sheriffs tirelessly search for a cost effective solution. In the meantime, officers continue to work long hours, with low pay and little to no backup.

Utilizing current 911 data can go a long way when it comes to managing resources. When you analyze existing data, you can identify trends such as the time of day, and location that crime is highest. With this knowledge Sheriff’s can create specific routes for deputies, that ensure these areas are patrolled, and backup is close by. When existing 911 data is combined with technologies such as GPS tracking, Sheriffs can begin to put a dent in rising crime rates, with out putting more feet on the ground.

There are many more new technologies, available to assist with dwindling local Government funding, increased demand for policing services, larger territories, and limited manpower. And while technology can’t solve every issue faced by rural law enforcement it can truly be a lifesaver.

Rural First provides GPS Tracking solutions designed specifically for First Responders, that serve Rural Communities throughout the US. If you are considering the benefits of fleet management for your office, we would love to show you how we can become a valued member of your team.