One of the most significant challenges facing public safety agencies is the speed and control of communications. When a major incident occurs, it can be difficult to get everyone on the same page, whether it involves one agency or several. While text messaging can be an easy way to reach multiple people at once, it’s not secure and can pose legal challenges. A retired police chief has dealt with this issue firsthand and is trying to change the way law enforcement officers and other first responders communicate through a new smartphone application.
Jeff Halstead, former Chief of Police of Fort Worth, Texas, and co-founder and president of Las Vegas-based Evertel, which was acquired by WSI Technologies in 2021, recently spoke to OFFICER Magazine about how the app has already helped public safety departments navigate securing their phone communications on and off duty.
Recognizing a need
During his 27-year career, Halstead’s most advanced form of internal communication was mass email. With the advancement of social media, he saw how quickly rumors and misinformation can spread. “In law enforcement, we can’t keep pace with the speed of social media posts—one tweet can impact millions of viewers in minutes,” he says. “We saw massive protests, flash mobs and serious groups of angry activists mobilized in minutes. Meanwhile, here we were in policing, drafting emails to inform and update our officers. I knew there had to be a better way for officers to be informed in real-time to avoid communication complications.”
Upon his retirement in 2015, he relocated to Las Vegas and focused his energy on researching and creating a secure and efficient method for agencies and their officers to share information and intelligence. “At the time, no satisfactory solution existed, and I realized if there was going to be one, we would have to build it,” he says. In Vegas, he would meet his current partners, who had experience building software platforms and mobile apps. Together, they launched of the beta version of BLUE in the spring of 2017, focused solely on police departments. That fall, an incident close to home would change their mission.
On Oct. 1, 2017, a gunman opened fire from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel on a crowd attending the Route 91 Harvest music festival on the Las Vegas Strip. Sixty people were killed and more than 400 more were wounded. It was the largest mass shooting in U.S. history.
“In addition to day-to-day operations, we realized police, fire, EMS, and all first responders needed the ability to collaborate, share intelligence and deploy from their smartphones before, during and after these massive crisis events.,” says Halstead. BLUE was relaunched with intra-agency, intra-first responder capabilities. As BLUE became used by more agencies, it was rebranded as “Evertel” in order to capture the inclusive mission of the smartphone application to serve all public safety agencies. “Since so many technology platforms only allow agencies to share with like Evertel agencies on the same platform, our engineers created the ability to share crime information, wanted persons, missing persons and any important information to as many agencies as they need,” says Halstead, adding that agencies that use Evertel do not have to pay any additional fees to connect with other agencies and that those agencies don’t need to be signed up for Evertel in order to join a conversation as an invitee.
Getting buy-in
Haltom City Police Chief Cody Phillips knew Halstead from his time as chief of Fort Worth. In the latter part of 2018, Halstead asked Phillips if his department would be interested in using Evertel. Phillips reluctantly told him yes, knowing it would be a hard sell to his staff. “The problem with cops is, they hate change, and they also hate the way things are. So, you can’t have one without the other,” he says. “It was kind of hard to push this new platform out and get acceptance and buy-in on it and consistent use.”
When the department first began using the application, some of the officers became frustrated because it was something new they were asked to use. He sent out an email to his staff. “Give it a chance. We are only a few weeks into the program, and you are frustrated it’s getting pushed out, but with anything, give it a chance,” he wrote. “If it doesn’t work, it’s just as easy to pull the plug as it is to get into it. With anything, they say it takes 21 days to form a habit. Just give it a chance to work.”
In 2019, a Texas state law was passed requiring the retention of text messages and work-related materials from government employees, including first responders. Phillips says the software played a big role in becoming compliant with the new law. Phillips says that in his conversations with Halstead, he made sure that none of the information from the app would be stored on the officers’ phones. “One of the biggest concerns is that officers don’t want to put stuff on their phones because they don’t want their phones to become evidence,” he says. “It’s all done in Evertel. You don’t have to worry about the department or the city having to provide a service to store this information to meet the retention requirements by state law.”
Before Evertel, Phillips said there were different layers of communication from email to text messages. “There were so many different platforms that people were using and not everybody had access to the same information at the exact same time,” he says. “An officer may have email but may not have email installed on their phone away from work and the ability to provide information quickly and factually isn’t there because they don’t have access to it.”
So far, the department has mainly used Evertel to consolidate communications for major events and for sharing crime and gang information. He says that Evertel has put the information at his officers’ fingertips quickly and has made the way the department communicates internally more efficient. Within the app, different groups can be created for each event and unit. Each has a case number and the office next to it. Haltom City has groups set up for CID, SWAT, Traffic and each shift also has its own group.
Sharing information
He says that what really sold his department on Evertel was an investigation into the stabbing death of an UberEats driver back in January 2021. “That was our first big incident that we were able to utilize Evertel with, and we were able to disseminate information to everyone in the department quickly and a chain of communication started from officers who were working the night before,” he says. “That was very crucial in that case progressing as fast as it did, identifying those people and getting them into custody as quick as we did.”
Two juveniles were arrested in the driver’s murder and Phillips says the expectation was that the defense attorney would question every aspect of interaction because of their ages. “We were able to pull the archived communication up from Evertel. The messages are timestamped, and it showed a chronological order of all of our communications,” he says. “It was timestamped from start to finish, all the way into when they were in custody. We were able to present this to the district attorney and it’s helped that case.”
More recently on July 2, 2022, a gunman killed two people at a home in and wounded three Haltom City police officers and a neighbor before taking his own life. “We were able to push information out factually and quickly so that everybody had the same information about the officers’ injuries, where they were and what we needed,” says Phillips. “Everybody was getting that information, so it minimized the amount of phone calls to administration; it minimized phone calls to people who were at work.
