TiPS Episode 26 0204 asks the question nobody likes to ask out loud: Can a “cloud-based NG911” go offline?

You already know the answer. Yes. Of course it can.

And if anyone tells you it cannot, they are selling something.

In this episode, Fletch breaks down why “cloud” is not a force field. It is still infrastructure, and infrastructure fails. Sometimes the cloud provider has an incident, but more often the failure happens in the messy middle: the path to the cloud breaks, a dependency breaks, or your own building becomes the outage.

What “Cloud NG911” actually means (because it is not one thing)

How outages show up on the PSAP floor (spoiler: you do not get a nice email)

The four most common failure patterns:

Cannot reach the platform (fiber cut, carrier outage, ESInet transport, routing, firewall)

Reachable, but degraded and weird (maps stall, LVF/ECRF timeouts, CAD integration breaks, recording fails)

Vendor cloud region having a “moment” (shared dependencies across multiple agencies)

Your building is the outage (power, HVAC, network core failure, evacuation, smoke, flood)

“If this goes down… where do the calls go?”

Not in theory. Not in a binder. Automatically, pre-configured, pre-approved, and practiced. Because failover that is not tested is not failover. It is improv theater.

We also hit four Reality Checks:

Cloud does not eliminate outages, it changes the shape of outages

Vendor SLAs are not the same thing as your public promise

Failover that is not tested is fiction

Your weakest link is often local, and then everyone blames “the cloud”

Bottom line: Cloud can be a fantastic strategy when it is engineered with survivability. But cloud without survivability is just moving your single point of failure to a nicer zip code.

Everyone is watching for the big, dramatic NG911 failures—cyberattacks, outages, system crashes.

But the next major incident won’t look like that at all.

In this episode, Fletch dives into the subtle but growing risks inside the NG911 ecosystem: unvalidated data streams, enterprise integrations that aren’t fully tested, and assumptions that can quietly undermine real-world emergency response. The technology is advancing faster than the governance and training around it—and that’s exactly where trouble begins.

We’re not predicting chaos. We’re predicting reality.

And if you want to understand where the cracks will form before they become headlines, this is the episode to catch.

Catch more episodes at 911TiPS.com

Blogs at Fletch.TV

Follow on social: @Fletch911

Copyright ©2026 Fletch911, LLC. Media Productions Fletch911.com

College and campuses are not just bigger schools — they are entirely different safety ecosystems.

In this episode, we complete the four-part School Safety series with a deep dive into Higher Education and campus environments, where complexity is the rule, not the exception.

Unlike K-6 or secondary schools, college campuses combine:

Open, walkable environments

Indoor and outdoor venues

Residence halls, classrooms, athletic facilities, and public events

Young adults with independence — and risk

Authorized campus police departments operating alongside local responders

This creates what many would call a perfect storm for emergency response challenges. From active shooter risk and medical emergencies to crowd dynamics, delayed reporting, and digital bystanders, this episode examines how everything we’ve discussed in prior episodes converges on campus — and why traditional school safety models fall apart here.

We’ll explore:

Why higher education safety cannot rely on perimeter-based thinking

The role of campus police, EMS, and mutual aid coordination

How smartphones, situational awareness, and human behavior change response outcomes

What NG911, data sharing, and real-time intelligence should look like in a campus setting

And why closing the “safety circle” requires technology, policy, people, and training to meet in the middle finally.

This isn’t theory. This is operational reality.

Copyright ©2026 Fletch911, LLC Media Productions

http://Fletch911.com

Middle & High School Emergencies: Where Childhood Ends and Complexity Begins

In this episode. Fletch continues the school safety series by focusing on middle and high school environments, where emergency response becomes more complex, more dynamic, and far less predictable.

We explore:

Middle and high school students are not passive bystanders in emergencies. They are active participants—and systems, policies, and responders must be designed with that reality in mind.

If your safety model still assumes staff-only callers, fixed locations, or simple workflows, it’s already behind.

Copyright ©2026 Fletch911, LLC Media Productions

http://Fletch911.com

In this episode of TiPS: Today in Public Safety, we take a closer look at SAFE NJ, a statewide initiative launched by the New Jersey Department of Health in 2025 that shifts school safety conversations beyond locks, drills, and response — and squarely into prevention, mental health, and early intervention.

SAFE NJ is funded through a federal STOP School Violence grant and is designed to give students, families, and staff access to:

Anonymous reporting of safety and wellness concerns

Direct connection to licensed New Jersey mental health counselors through the 2NDFLOOR Youth Helpline

Referrals to community-based support resources that address underlying risk factors

This episode explores why programs like SAFE NJ matter to public safety professionals, educators, and policymakers — and how trauma-informed, low-barrier reporting can surface warning signs earlier, reduce stigma, and help prevent crises before first responders are ever dispatched.

For MORE ON SAFE NJ, visit: https://www.nj.gov/health/news/2025/approved/20250306a.shtml

Fletch also reminds listeners:

But SAFE NJ represents a broader ecosystem approach — aligning technology, mental health access, and community support with traditional emergency response models.

If you work in public safety, emergency communications, education, or school administration, this episode provides critical context on how prevention-focused programs are reshaping the future of school safety in New Jersey.

Thanks for listening to TiPS: Today in Public Safety. 

K–6 schools are not smaller versions of high schools.

They are fundamentally different emergency environments, defined by very young students, staff who may not have responder-level training, and incidents that rarely look like the scenarios most school safety plans are built around.

In this episode , Fletch focuses exclusively on K–6 environments and explains why lumping all schools into “K–12” creates dangerous assumptions during emergencies.

We break down:

Why K–6 emergencies are supervision problems first and response problems second

The most common incidents that trigger police, fire, and EMS responses in elementary schools

What first responders actually need when they arrive on scene, and why more dashboards don’t equal better information

How security monitoring, cameras, and AI can help quietly, without overwhelming teachers

Why teacher smart devices should support collaboration, not just act as panic buttons

How assisted attendance, real-time accountability, and reunification must be built into the response—not treated as afterthoughts

This episode also examines where most K–6 safety plans fail:

not because of a lack of technology, but because of poor assumptions about children, staff, and parental behavior under stress.

If you work in:

Public safety

Emergency communications

School safety planning

Education administration

Technology design for emergency response

This episode will challenge how you think about elementary school emergencies—and why getting K–6 right is foundational to everything that comes next.

When a 9-1-1 system fails, everyone suddenly knows exactly what isn’t their problem.

“That’s not our system.”

“That’s the network.”

“That’s the carrier.”

“That’s NG911.”

In this episode of TiPS: Today in Public Safety, Fletch takes on The Vendor Handoff Problem — the moment when accountability disappears between vendors, contracts, and interfaces, leaving PSAPs to manage the failure while everyone else passes the baton.

NG911 didn’t create this problem. It just exposed it.

As emergency communications becomes more modular — ESInets, call handling, GIS, logging, recording, additional data, AI tools, and enterprise feeds — the risk isn’t technology failure.

The risk is no one owning the outcome.

In this episode, Fletch breaks down:

• What the Vendor Handoff Problem really is

• Why NG911 makes accountability harder — and more necessary

• Why contracts are not accountability

• What dispatchers and the public expect when systems fail

• How agencies can design accountability before the outage happens

Because from the public’s perspective, 911 is one system.

And “that’s not our system” is never an acceptable answer.

👍 💬 Drop a comment — where have you seen accountability fall apart during an outage?

🔗 More TiPS content: https://911TiPS.com

🔗 Follow on X: https://x.com/@Fletch911

🔗 Blogs & long-form content: https://Fletch.TV

Copyright ©2026 Fletch911, LLC Media Productions

http://Fletch911.com

Everyone loves buying new technology.

New CAD. New phones. New dashboards. New AI tools.

But when it’s time to train the people who actually have to use it, suddenly there’s “no budget.”

In this episode of TiPS: Today in Public Safety, Fletch digs into the concept of training debt—the hidden cost that never shows up on a spreadsheet, but always shows up somewhere else.

We talk about:

Why “figure it out as you go” is not a training strategy

How untrained systems drive burnout, fear, and quiet operational mistakes

The connection between inadequate training and employee shrinkage, sick time, and resignations

The HR and liability fallout that surfaces when something goes wrong

Why modern NG911, CAD, and AI tools demand more competence, not less

If leadership says there’s no budget for training, what they’re really saying is they’ve chosen to pay later—with turnover, grievances, operational risk, and public trust. 

Training isn’t a perk. It’s infrastructure. And when training lags technology, the bill always comes due—just not from the line item you expected.

Zero Trust has become one of the most overused phrases in cybersecurity.

If something feels risky, the answer is often, “Just add Zero Trust.” And in enterprise IT, that approach usually works. But in 9-1-1, where seconds matter and failure can mean silence, Zero Trust isn’t always a safeguard. Sometimes, it becomes a liability.

In this episode of TiPS: Today in Public Safety, Fletch breaks down what Zero Trust actually means, why enterprises love it, and why blindly applying enterprise security models to emergency communications can create unintended and dangerous consequences.

We explore:

What Zero Trust really is (and what it is not)

Why denial-based security works in business environments

How 9-1-1 fundamentally differs from enterprise IT

Where Zero Trust controls collide with life-safety realities

Why availability, not confidentiality, must remain the top priority

How Zero Trust must be mission-adapted, not vendor-imported, for NG911

This episode isn’t anti-security. It’s about applying security correctly in systems where access delays, silent failures, and automated denial can cost lives. 

Because 9-1-1 isn’t enterprise IT. It’s public safety infrastructure.

Portals are easy.

Portals are shiny.

Portals demo well.

And that’s exactly why PSAPs are drowning in them.

In this episode of TiPS: Today in Public Safety, we tackle a growing operational problem hiding in plain sight: dashboard overload. CAD portals. Mapping portals. Video portals. IoT portals. ALPR portals. Building data portals. Vendor portal number seventeen.

Individually, each system promises better situational awareness. Collectively, they create fragmentation, cognitive overload, and workflow chaos.

This episode is not anti-technology. It’s anti-fragmentation.

We dig into:

Why portals are so tempting for vendors and agencies

How humans have quietly become the integration layer inside the PSAP

Why dashboard fatigue is no longer an inconvenience, but a safety issue

The difference between presenting data and orchestrating it

Why “just one more dashboard” is not a modernization strategy

NG911 isn’t about showing more data.

It’s about delivering the right data, to the right person, at the right time, without making them hunt for it.