Elmore County Sheriff's Office Joins FirstNet—America's Public Safety Communications Platform

The ELmore County Sheriff's Office announced Wednesday it is connecting its officers to FirstNet, making it Idaho's largest law enforcement agency to join the new nationwide communications platform just for public safety.

FirstNet is designed to improve communications across public safety entities nationwide, allowing first responders to easily and quickly communicate with one another during everyday situations, big events or emergencies. This is integral to solving for the common roadblock that communications issues have imposed on past public safety responses. The official announcement was made during a capabilities demonstration by FirstNet held at the Elmore County Sheriff's Office. At the event Sheriff Mike Hollinshead demonstrated the uses of the various FirstNet communications capabilities available to the first responder community.

"Rural Idaho presents significant challenges in terms of emergency communications coverage and interoperability," he said. "FirstNet is addressing our challenges of coverage and providing state of the art capabilities needed to ensure the safety of the public and our law enforcement officers."

For the full listing of the capabilities this platform will give to members of ECSO pick up a copy of next week's paper hitting newsstands on April 24.