It was recently my privilege to sit down to lunch with Dan Crowley, president of Raytheon’s Network Centric Systems, to discuss the importance of technology in law enforcement and where that technology might be headed.
Foremost, Crowley takes a holistic approach to problem solving—which is what technology is at its essence: a means to solve problems. He looks at the system from afar before recommending solutions, and he thinks big. Crowley encourages law enforcement to think big, too.
“From the military side of our business, we have the soldiers come to us and tell us what they need, and then it’s our challenge to build it. We actually tell them to dream of their ideal, irrespective of what currently exists. This is where Raytheon thrives, in making that happen.”
“I’ve never seen a company like it,” Mike Bostic told me. A former Los Angeles assistant chief of police, Bostic has retired to work as a customer advocate for Raytheon. “Instead of coming in and saying, ‘Here’s what we make and here’s why you need it,’ they come in and they ask questions. They say, ‘Tell us what you want.’ The sky’s the limit.”
To support big thinking, Raytheon is creating what they call the Public Safety Regional Technology Center. The 27,000-square-foot center in Downey, Calif., will employ as many as 150 people as it provides test and research facilities, maintenance and logistics, and customer and systems support. From the way Crowley described it, it sounds like a think tank for public safety.
Raytheon also began a relationship in January with the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science at UCLA. Here, Raytheon will build the Center for Public Safety Network Systems.
“If you can aggregate R-and-D dollars in a few centers of excellence like this, you will change public safety,” says Crowley, which is what he and his company seem set out to do.
This is well and fine, but money is a major consideration—if not the major consideration—when a department invests in technology today. Crowley not only recognizes this, but he has accepted it as inherent to this business: “The days of a chief going to the city and saying, ‘I need x-million dollars’ are gone.”
The approach of buying one system at a time, one department at a time, actually ends up costing much more in the long run—in terms of the technology’s money as well as its effectiveness. “The idea that major technologies are bought piecemeal prevents information sharing and the full use of technology,” Crowley says.
Technology will also become more affordable. “By leveraging the commercial user base, public safety technologies will come down in price,” says Crowley. “Lower price points will in turn create a profusion of public safety technologies. It won’t happen overnight, but the trend is clear.
“In the long run, it’s more expensive for each city to run procurements and negotiate refresh rates than for them to pool with other cities to create economies of scale. … The value of the network improves with the number of users on the network.”
Crowley joined Raytheon after 27 years with Lockheed Martin. A soft-spoken man, he brings ample experience, but he brings little in the way of presumptions about the public safety market. He asks a lot of questions, and he listens. When he speaks, his words carry the weight of his deliberation. He gave me a lot to think about.