Sprint’s bad GPS rap? Or is it a bad rap?

Marjie Lundstrom, who writes for The Sacramento Bee has a nice piece on the current http://insidebayarea.com OpEd page. Regular readers here will will recall I posted several blasts at Sprint regarding their handling of a recent “carnapping” involving a young boy. See:
http://satviz.com/GPS_Blog/?p=53 and:
http://satviz.com/GPS_Blog/?p=54

The Sacramento Bee article delved into this event a little deeper. Kudos on that, because today’s news is so often a one or two shot deal, where the media reports on something like a match in a pool of gasoline and then forgets about the issue completely in a day or two.

As Marjie’s piece notes, there are always issues behind the scenes that may not come to light on first reporting. The original sensational aspect of the story was an allegation that Sprint, upon being notified that a young child was effectively kidnapped and suspected of bing in the same car as a Sprint GPS-enabled cellular phone refused to offer assistance to the sheriff’s department until they had a court order and a $25 service fee for the assistance in-hand. Previously, a Sprint represented that the $25 fee was not presented as a requirement. Impossible to tell at this juncture in time whose version of that part of the story was correct.

It does appear, though, that in this case it may well be that the sheriff’s office did not respond rapidly to Sprint’s fully reasonable requirement that the request for tracking assistance be transmitted to them in fax format on Sheriff’s Department letterhead. Nothing, in my view, wrong with that safeguard to insure the request was not from an impostor, and it takes perhaps a minute, tops, to write a note on a piece of letterhead and drop it in a fax machine. Based on this interpretation, I’ll back down on my anti-Sprint diatribe.

The issue that does present itself, though, is the very apparent need for cellular carriers and law enforcement to realize that there are now systems in place very different than just a few years ago. The time delay in this incident is also in dispute now, but the delay caused by apparent mis-communication between the searchers and the phone company may have been as much as 2 plus hours.

If you’re in this line of work, or you care about what your local, country and state law enforcement agencies are doing to improve their effectiveness, you might want to investigate what sort of procedures are currently in place and what sort of procedures ought to be put in place for the future.

Every aspect of law enforcement/public service is driven, to some extent, by money. Every person speaking for public emergency services agencies will normally be unable to utter or write more than a sentence or two without bringing up the budget and how superior service costs money. Fair enough.

But in the area of GPS tracking phones, as an example, we now have a significant infrastructure in place, an infrastructure that is growing day by day, that essentially costs nothing to integrate into public service emergency functions. The only real holdup is agencies looking at what resources available in their local area and putting the procedures in place to effectively use these functions _now_, that is, before a car is stolen and a child is missing and adrenalin is flowing. Worthy of thought.