TAK for law enforcement
Dispatch is the only person who knows where everyone is, and is relaying it one radio transmission at a time. That is the twenty minutes this is for.
Know where your units are
Live positions for every officer carrying a phone or tablet, shared only with the people you authorise.
Plan and brief in place
Drop markers, routes and overlays before an operation and have them on every device when it starts.
Work with neighbours
Federate with another agency for a mutual-aid response, and stop when it is over.
The clients are free and run on phones your officers already carry. What has been missing is the server in the middle, and that is the part we run.
Where a shared map changes the shift
The value is rarely in the routine call. It is in the twenty minutes at the top of this page: a perimeter going up, three units converging from different directions, and one person holding the whole picture in their head.
A live map replaces most of that traffic with something everyone can see at once. Containment gets set against what is actually on the ground rather than against a street name somebody half-heard. Units arriving late orient themselves without asking. The radio goes back to carrying the things that genuinely need saying.
Multi-agency without merging agencies
Mutual aid is where situational awareness usually falls apart, because the agencies involved do not share systems and have no reason to. The usual workaround is a phone tree and a lot of goodwill.
Federation is built for this. You connect two networks for the duration of an incident, decide exactly what crosses the boundary, and disconnect afterwards. Neither agency gives up control of its own network, its own users or its own data, and nobody has to agree on a shared procurement to make it work.
What it takes to run a pilot
The obstacle to trying TAK has never been the software — ATAK is free and runs on hardware most officers already carry. The obstacle is that using it meant standing up a server, a certificate authority and a federation configuration first, which means a project, which means a budget cycle.
Five devices are free with no card, so a pilot is a decision a sergeant can make on a Tuesday. Run a shift with it, see whether it changes anything, and only then have the conversation about scaling it. The pricing page covers what happens after that.
What an officer actually sees
On the device it is a map with people on it. Every unit carrying a client shows up with a callsign and a team colour, updating as they move. Markers, routes and overlays somebody dropped during the brief are already there.
That is deliberately unremarkable, and it matters. The failure mode for anything issued to a patrol shift is that it demands attention during the part of the job that already demands all of it. A map you glance at works. A system that needs operating does not get used twice.
Common questions
Can other agencies see our units?
Only if you federate with them and choose to share that channel. Networks are isolated by default, and federation is configured deliberately, per boundary, with control over what crosses it.
Does every officer need a department-issued device?
No. ATAK runs on ordinary Android phones and tablets, and iTAK on iPhones. A retired phone with no cell plan still works over Wi-Fi, which is how a lot of departments run their first pilot.
What happens where there is no coverage?
Positions stop flowing until a device is back on a network, but maps, imagery and overlays loaded in advance stay on the device. Planning ahead of a signal gap is the difference between a degraded picture and no picture.
How quickly can we revoke someone’s access?
Immediately, from the console. Removing a user removes their access to the network rather than leaving a certificate in circulation on a device you no longer control.
Do we have to buy a server?
No. That is the point of a hosted TAK server: there is no hardware, no certificate authority to stand up, and nothing to put through procurement before a pilot.
The server was the only thing in the way
Five devices, free, with no card and no clock. Put your team on one map for a weekend and find out properly.