About SAFECOM

Mission

The tragic events of 9/11 clarified the critical importance of effective emergency responder communication systems. The lack of emergency response interoperability is a long-standing, complex, and costly problem with many impediments to overcome. Interoperability is the ability of emergency response agencies to talk to one another via radio communication systems—to exchange voice and/or data with one another on demand, in real time, when needed and when authorized.

While several government programs have made great strides in addressing this issue, much of this work has been disconnected, fragmented, and often conflicting. In an effort to coordinate the various federal initiatives, the SAFECOM program was established by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and approved by the President’s Management Council (PMC) as a high priority E-Gov initiative. More specifically, SAFECOM is a communications program within the Office for Interoperability and Compatibility (OIC) that provides research, development, testing and evaluation, guidance, tools, and templates on communications-related issues to local, tribal, state, and Federal emergency response agencies working to improve emergency response through more effective and efficient interoperable wireless communications.

SAFECOM is pursuing its mission on a variety of fronts and is consistently guided by the input of local and regional emergency response officials.

Leadership

The Office of Emergency Communications (OEC) supports SAFECOM’s development of guidance, tools and templates. The Office for Interoperability and Compatibility (OIC) supports SAFECOM-related research, development, testing, evaluation and standards. OEC is managed by the Directorate for National Protection and Programs. OIC is managed by the Science and Technology Directorate.

SAFECOM Leadership >>

Governance

SAFECOM adheres to a bottom-up approach, which means the program relies heavily on local and state emergency response practitioners for input and guidance as it works to define and implement solutions for the interoperability challenge.

As a practitioner-driven program, SAFECOM has developed a governance structure that facilitates the input of local and state emergency response practitioners. Through the Program’s Executive Committee (EC) and Emergency Response Council (ERC), the emergency response community and local, tribal, state, and Federal policy makers provide strategic input to the SAFECOM Program.

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Initiatives

RapidCom
On July 22, 2004, President Bush formally announced the RapidCom initiative, a program designed to ensure that a minimum level of emergency response interoperability would be in place in ten high-threat urban areas by September 30, 2004.

With the initial work of RapidCom now complete, incident commanders in each of the urban areas now have the ability to adequately communicate with each other and their respective command centers within one hour of an incident. With the input of local emergency response officials, RapidCom identified and advanced five “critical success factors” essential to interoperable systems as represented in the Interoperability Continuum.

Statewide Communications Interoperability Planning (SCIP) Methodology
SAFECOM partnered with the Commonwealth of Virginia to develop a strategic plan for improving statewide interoperable communications with support from NIJ.

Based on the lessons learned from the Commonwealth of Virginia's planning process, SAFECOM released the Statewide Communications Interoperability Planning (SCIP) Methodology for integrating practitioner input into a successful statewide strategic plan. The SCIP Methodology serves as one approach for states to consider as they initiate statewide communications planning efforts.

The SCIP Methodology is also available in the Find it Fast section of this website.

Statement of Requirements (SoR)
SAFECOM released the first-ever Statement of Requirements (SoR) for public safety communications interoperability in April 2004. This statement defines future requirements for crucial voice and data communications in day-to-day, task force, and mutual aid operations. The National Institute of Justice’s CommTech Program (formerly AGILE) partnered with SAFECOM in formulating and releasing the requirements.

With the SoR, the nation’s 60,000 emergency response agencies – for the first time – have a document that serves as a first step toward establishing base-level communications and interoperability standards for all emergency response agencies. The SoR helps the emergency response community convey a shared and vetted vision that ultimately will help private industry better align research and development efforts with critical interoperable communication needs.

Version 1.0 is available here for download.

Frequently Asked Questions

This section includes SAFECOM's Frequently Asked Questions.

SAFECOM FAQs >>