School shootings prompt states to fund digital maps
When a motion detector went off overnight at Kromrey Middle School, a police dispatcher called up a digital map of the building, pinpointed the detector, clicked on a live feed from the nearest camera and relayed the intruder's location to responding police.
Within moments, they captured the culprit: a teenager, dressed in dark clothes and a ski mask but carrying no weapon.
The map and cameras “let the dispatcher keep things from becoming super-escalated,” said the school's security director, Jim Blodgett. “The dispatcher could see that it looked like a student ... just kind of goofing around in the building.”
Spurred by mass shootings, thousands of school districts have hired companies to produce detailed digital maps that can help police, firefighters and medical professionals respond more quickly in emergencies.
The Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District, where the teenage trespasser entered from a roof hatch, was an early adopter in Wisconsin, which has since provided mapping grants to about 200 districts.
More than 20 states have enacted or proposed digital school mapping measures in the past few years, according to an Associated Press analysis aided by the bill-tracking software Plural. Florida approved $14 million in grants last year. Michigan allotted $12.5 million. New Jersey allocated $12.3 million in federal pandemic relief funds to complete digital maps of every school in the state.
Critical Response Group, run by an Army special operations veteran, has been driving the trend. The New Jersey-based company's CEO Mike Rodgers recently told lawmakers in Maryland how he used gridded digital maps during deployments and was surprised the school where his wife taught had nothing similar. So he mapped her school, then expanded — to 12,000 schools and counting, nationwide.
“When an emergency happens at a school or a place of worship, most likely it's the first time those responders have ever gone there,” Rodgers told the AP. “They're under a tremendous amount of stress and they're working with people they're not familiar with, which is exactly the same problem that the military is faced with overseas, and ultimately that's why this technique was born.”
Lobbying and competition
Many of the state laws and bills contain nearly identical wording championed by Rodgers' company. They require verification by a walk-through of each campus and free compatibility with any software already used by local schools and public safety agencies. They must be overlaid with aerial imagery and gridded coordinates, “oriented true north” and “contain sitespecific labeling” for rooms, doors, hallways, stairwells, utility locations, hazards, key boxes, trauma kits and automated external defibrillators.
The standards create “a competitive, fair environment” for all vendors, Rodgers said. But when New Jersey sought a mapping contractor, the Critical Response Group had “the only product that was available in the state that answered the legislative criteria,” State Police mapping coordinator Lt. Brendan Liston said.
The New Jersey law required “critical incident mapping data,” a phrase that Critical Response Group tried to trademark.
Critical Response Group has hired lobbyists in more than 20 states to advocate for specific standards, according to an AP review of state lobbying records. Competitors also have engaged lobbyists to wrangle over the precise wording. In some states, lawmakers have gone with a more generic label of “school mapping data.”