Opticom Incident-Based Preemption for law enforcement

Learn how Opticom Incident-Based Preemption helps law enforcement agencies arrive safely without less disruption to traffic operations

Opticom Incident-Based Preemption for law enforcement helps resolve a potential reservation that some traffic engineers have about priority control. This solution enables law enforcement agencies to arrive safely at emergencies with fewer disruptions to traffic operations.

Despite the immense popularity of emergency vehicle preemption with fire departments, law enforcement agencies have not adopted Opticom™ EVP to the same extent.  

Some city traffic departments have objected to granting the same privileges to law enforcement, with concerns of excess congestion given the number of law enforcement vehicles and the volume of calls they respond to every day. 

So, GTT has developed incident-based preemption to address those concerns. This new Opticom priority control feature allows preemption to be activated based on pre-determined incident types and/or priority levels by integrating Opticom EVP with the department’s or city’s CAD – or computer-aided dispatch – system.  

With this approach, public safety leaders can collaborate with their local traffic engineering department to determine the specific emergency situations that warrant the use of emergency vehicle preemption, for example medical emergencies or other time-sensitive calls. The Opticom system would receive the incident information from the CAD and enable preemption for vehicles dispatched to high-priority incidents only, thus significantly reducing the number of preemption calls in a given day. 

Here’s how a city could establish its emergency vehicle preemption usage policy: Preemption would be granted for the more urgent priority 1 and 2 calls. But preemption would not be granted for priority calls 3-5 and traffic lights would operate as normal. 

Integrating Opticom with an agency’s CAD system can help ensure officers get to the highest priority calls as quickly and safely as possible, while otherwise mitigating the risk of traffic disruptions and other potential concerns.  

To learn more, contact your local sales rep today.