Section excerpted from the full original story in Police Chief Magazine

Some companies have placed their focus on what is happening on the road.

This rings true for the Chicago, Illinois–based HAAS Alert. Their collision prevention service, Safety Cloud, provides protection and connection for law enforcement fleets.

Safety Cloud can be activated by equipping a small transponder onto the lightbar of any emergency vehicle—no matter the make, model, or lightbar type. It can also be activated on telematics and connectivity platforms such as Cradlepoint, Verizon Connect, and Geotab. The service enhances the effectiveness of emergency lighting by alerting drivers to slow down and move over as they approach active roadside incidents.

“What we’re doing here is essentially vehicle-to-vehicle communication from emergency vehicles,” said Director of Communications Brock Aun. “Everything that we do operates over everyday cellular networks, so this is something that can be employed in any community.”

When an emergency vehicle’s lightbar is activated, Safety Cloud delivers alerts to approaching drivers up to 30 seconds in advance. Although the feature has been housed on navigation applications, such as Waze, for several years, Stellantis became the first automaker to put these alerts into the dashboard of the vehicle this January.

“Our core is digital alerting,” said Aun. “That being said, if you are on Safety Cloud, you have access to what we call our situational dashboard; and that dashboard is essentially a fleet management dashboard.” The departments utilizing this free feature will see a live map of the community that identifies the department’s vehicle location and whether or not the vehicles are actively alerting to other drivers. Monthly reporting of how many incidents the officers have responded to, how many drivers have been alerted, and officers’ average time on scene can all be provided through the management dashboard.

HAAS Alert is hoping to prevent collisions that can result in costly repairs, injuries, and even line-of-duty deaths through the use of Safety Cloud.