When tornadoes swept through Oklahoma, first responders quickly began to feel overwhelmed. In particular, public safety professionals with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), which oversees emergency response on… tribal lands in the United States, felt stretched thin in their attempts to respond to calls for help.

BIA officials decided they needed a different kind of solution—one that would not only allow them to adequately respond to emergency calls, but also would allow them to stay connected with community members in need and one another. They turned to Nomad GCS, a vehicle and advanced interoperable communication solutions provider headquartered in Columbia Falls, Montana.

“These are huge swaths of ground, with no service, no repeaters, no way of staying connected to your fellow officers,” recalled Will Schmautz, CEO of Nomad GCS. “They called and asked about van-based solutions. They needed something to establish and maintain connectivity.”

The large specialty vehicles Nomad GCS provides to customers in law enforcement can help police cover wide or tricky terrain and generally reach places that are relatively difficult to access by traditional methods or with traditional vehicles. This can also mean motor vehicles or bikes—and, sometimes, a vehicular system, as opposed to an actual vehicle—can help police find bad guys in hard-to-reach places.

In Oklahoma, the BIA now owns six Tactical Command Vehicles from Nomad GCS. Each contains an environmentally controlled shelter, a pneumatic mast with a surveillance system, a two-meter AVL satellite, a reach-back antenna land mobile radio (LMR) interoperability suite, two 19″ data racks, advanced voice and data communications, and remote power management and systems control capabilities, among other features.

“It’s a space for people to work out of,” Schmautz said. “We’ve always been fans of connectivity. People on the ground doing the work remain connected. What we can bring to the table for the situational awareness puzzle. Our solutions are wrapped around connectivity and the interoperability approach.”

Nomad GCS also provides specialty vehicles from light trucks to large motor coaches, for purposes ranging from surveillance to SWAT operations.

Power Bikes

In April 2019, Trystan Andrew Terrell opened fire in a classroom on the campus of the University of North Carolina (UNC) Charlotte where he had formerly been a student. Before he could be apprehended, Terrell killed two students and wounded four others.

In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, UNC Charlotte officials took a close look at their response and devised options for what they could do better in the future. One of the issues that needed to be addressed was the difficulty officers had in traversing the campus to arrive and adequately respond to the incident. The solution? A power bike.

Also known as an electric bike or e-bike, a power bike is a bicycle that contains an integrated electric motor that can be used for propulsion. In the case of UNC Charlotte, power bikes were deemed to be an efficient solution well suited to the sprawling terrain of the campus.

According to UNC Charlotte Police Chief Jeffrey Baker, the power bikes “will allow police to get to emergencies more quickly.”

The power bikes in use at UNC Charlotte were supplied by Recon Power Bikes, a manufacturer based in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

“The law enforcement patrol bike is safe, and it’s faster than a normal bike,” said Recon Power Bikes owner Jeff Fuze. “An officer can respond from a distance and arrive on scene without being fatigued or winded like he would be on a normal bike. The range is 50 miles with a top speed of 30 miles per hour.”

The Interceptor is Recon’s flagship model for the law enforcement market. The bike uses a 1,000-watt, mid-driven, high torque motor powered by a 48V/11.6 ah lithium ion battery, with 4″ all-terrain tires below. The motor helps propel the bike, either instead of or in combination with the officer’s own self-propulsion.

“The overall design of the bike, which includes fat tires, is unique to police patrol,” said Tim Burns, Recon Power Bikes’ sales and dealer development manager. “You can ride it like a regular motor [bike] or not, or with a combination. The coverage can now be expanded to a larger patrol area without the officer being fatigued. It’s good for school or university patrol. We can get a bike across a campus a lot faster compared with other vehicles.”

Recon bikes are also being used to patrol the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the Washington, DC, headquarters of the FBI, and the company offers training for end users.

Remote Assistance

Sometimes a vehicle can help officers cover ground remotely and locate hard-to-find criminals, even when the vehicle does not even belong to the agency. That’s the case with OnStar, the subscription-based service that is available on vehicles manufactured by General Motors, the well-known Detroit, Michigan, auto manufacturer. OnStar, which provides consumers with security, emergency, hands-free calling, navigation, and remote diagnostics assistance, also can assist law enforcement, most notably in cases of vehicle theft.

Specifically, OnStar offers three separate services that can assist law enforcement: location assistance, remote ignition block, and stolen vehicle slowdown.

“We offer a series of safety and security technologies when customers are in crashes or vehicles that have been stolen,” said Sherry LeVeque, emergency services outreach leader for OnStar and General Motors. “We assist in locating stolen vehicles and safely apprehending the suspect.”

Once a car is confirmed as stolen—a process that typically occurs through verbal communication with law enforcement and confirming the vehicle identification number—OnStar professionals can slow down the car to the point where further evasion essentially becomes impossible.

“Slowdown occurs after [the vehicle has] been confirmed as stolen,” LeVeque said. “We slow the vehicle down to three to five miles per hour after the confirmation, but the brakes and steering remain intact, so it is still safe to maneuver.”

With remote ignition block, OnStar can prevent a car from restarting once it has been shut off, thus forcing the vehicle—and, to some extent, the suspect—into an idle state.

“We send a signal to the vehicle that prevents that vehicle from being restarted once a theft has been confirmed,” LeVeque said.

According to LeVeque, OnStar assists with more than 1,500 cases each month, a number that’s increasing now that more officers are becoming more aware of OnStar’s capabilities, Leveque said. General Motors offers an in-depth online training video for the public safety sector at www.onstar.com/publicsafety.

Another increasingly employed remote concept is the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or drone. While they are becoming more popular in law enforcement and beyond, UAVs remain a fairly novel tool—but one that holds plenty of potential for a range of situations, including when it comes to accessing places that are difficult to reach with traditional means.

Flymotion, a UAV dealer based in Tampa, Florida, offers several drones designed specifically for the public safety sector. One is the Zenmuse XT2, which comes equipped with infrared sensors. The Zenmuse Z30 features a high-powered zoom camera. In those and other cases, however, UAVs are capable of carrying all manner of payloads, from radios to first aid kits to life preservers.

Whether they run on four wheels, two wheels, or no wheels at all, vehicles and
vehicle systems are giving officers better access to the varied scenarios and terrains they encounter as they respond to calls.

Please cite as

Scott Harris, “Reaching the Hard-to-Reach Places—Specialty Vehicles Help Agencies Cover Ground,” Product Feature, Police Chief 86, no. 12 (December 2019): 70–72.