Paving the Way for Interoperable Communication

The Greater Boston Police Council (GBPC) can trace its start back to the late 60s. An informal group of Police Chiefs from some Metro Boston communities had a series of meetings about what we now refer to as mutual aid. Their concerns at the time were manpower, training, funding, and sharing of assets.

The core of the group were Chiefs Bergan of Chelsea, Regan of Cambridge, O’Brien of Somerville, Purcell of Newton, Commissioner McNamara of Boston, and some other chiefs from neighboring cities and towns. At that time, there was no formal structure, meeting schedule, or any financial obligation on the part of the agencies; it was merely a group of chiefs who would meet now and then to discuss timely topics.

The period 1968–1972 was a period of great civil unrest nationwide, the focus being namely America’s involvement in Vietnam. Given the large number of colleges and universities in the area, Boston was a hotbed of dissent. In late ’69, there were some very loud protests in the Boston/Cambridge area, some of which produced violence and destruction.

To properly police these disturbances, Boston and/or Cambridge had to request help from other Eastern Massachusetts police agencies. Although many communities sent aid, the large complicating factor was the lack of communication between departments.

Back in this time period, police agencies generally had one frequency by which to communicate with their officers. Some smaller agencies would even share one frequency. However, when many agencies responded to a designated community needing assistance, there was no effective means of communication for command and control.

The sole means of radio communication at the time was the inter-city frequency that could communicate from one department's base station to another department’s base. Thereby, if an officer in, say, an area of Somerville wanted to communicate with a contingent of officers from Medford, the Somerville commander would contact their dispatch center, the dispatch center would then call via the inter-city to Medford dispatch, who, in turn, would contact their officers, would may have already been in Somerville.

This was state-of-the-art at the time, but a very ineffective means of communication; furthermore, where there was only one frequency, it was very often a case where more than one agency would try to broadcast at the same time another would be trying to transmit. Often, a dispatch center receiving a request from the field would revert to calling the neighboring department on the telephone.

Realizing that law enforcement was starting into a new era where more and more mutual aid would come into play, this informal group looked at communications or the lack thereof as their number one priority. In 1971, this core group brainstormed and, looking at the state of land mobile radio, quickly realized that there were just insufficient frequencies in the high band allocation to solve their issues.

They, therefore, petitioned the FCC for a block of frequencies in the ultra-high bands (UHF T Band) so that like-minded Metro Boston agencies could migrate into the planned public safety radio network.