Join fellow attendees to kick off the 2026 Tech Conference, featuring welcome remarks from IACP leadership and Fort Worth Police Department, followed by an impactful presentation. Progress with Purpose--Leading Policing Through Technological Change Law enforcement has experienced dramatic technological change--but the fundamentals of leadership remain constant. This session explores that evolution through the perspective of leaders who have guided agencies through shifting tools, budgets, and expectations. Dean Gialamas, Commanding Officer of the Los Angeles Police Department Information Technology Bureau, shares lessons learned from building systems before today's infrastructure existed and leading innovation while maintaining trust.

Kick off the 50th anniversary by honoring its legacy, highlighting the IACP's transformative impact on policing technology, and showcasing advances in communications, interoperability, information sharing, facial recognition, body worn cameras, license plate recognition, artificial intelligence, digital evidence management, and more. A distinguished panel will reflect on the evolution of the IACP Technology Conference into one of the world's premier law enforcement technology events. Attendees will explore a historical exhibit recognizing five decades of innovation and progress. Looking ahead, the session will examine how the Law Enforcement Information and Technology (LEIT) Section and the IACP Technology Policy Council continue to prepare agencies to confront the next wave of technological challenges and opportunities.

• Preview IACP's Technology Conference 2026 Anniversary Celebration, including a historical technology exhibit and commemorative initiatives.
• Gain insights into the LEIT Section's 50-year legacy and its influence on policing and technology.
• Understand how IACP is equipping agencies to meet the next wave of innovation in public safety technology.

Chief Security Officer Justin McQuown and Paul E. Pepe, MD, FAEMS, translate two decades of high-threat protective operations and global EMS leadership into practical playbooks for police technology leaders. Using real-world cases--including arena tours, civic events, and active-assailant and mass-casualty incident (MCI) responses--they demonstrate how AI-zoned alerting, unified communications, and medically informed tactics reduce time to action, improve crowd outcomes, and strengthen multiagency coordination--without adding complexity for officers in the field.

• Attendees will be able to describe and diagram an end-to-end AI-zoned mass-notification workflow for law-enforcement operations, identifying triggers, routing paths, message templates, and role-based approvals.
• Attendees will be able to analyze and select the appropriate alerting modalities and medically informed tactics for active-assailant and mass-gathering incidents, coordinating real-time actions with PSAP/9-1-1, EMS, and venue security.
• Attendees will be able to draft a 90-day implementation plan that defines technical requirements, governance/SOPs, and training & tabletop exercises, and establishes performance metrics.

Drone as First Responder (DFR) programs represent a significant technological innovation in policing, offering the potential to transform emergency response and improve service delivery. However, despite growing interest and adoption, there remains limited empirical evidence on the impact of DFR on crime, response times, officer safety, and investigations. This panel features leaders from four agencies actively engaged in an independent evaluation of their DFR programs--Kansas City, Cincinnati, Oklahoma City, and Colorado Springs--along with the evaluation team lead from Ohio State University, who will serve as moderator. Panelists will share practical insights into operational considerations, challenges, and lessons learned in developing rigorous approaches to assessing DFR effectiveness to help guide policy and practice.

• Define key metrics that can be used to assess DFR program impact and effectiveness.
• Describe the common challenges agencies and research partners face in balancing operational realities with rigorous evaluation needs.
• Assess their own agency's readiness for evaluating the impact of DFR.

Most police officers have an innate ability to project command presence and use dynamic language to manage the situations they encounter. However, documenting those experiences remains a constant challenge, often requiring hours of tedious report writing and time behind a desk. Advances in AI and other technologies can enable better, faster, and more accurate police reports by capturing officers' own words--as well as those of the individuals they encounter--to help build stronger case narratives. With many police agencies struggling to maintain adequate staffing levels, there has never been a greater need to increase productivity among existing personnel. This panel will highlight ways officers can write as effectively as they speak--automatically--greatly improving efficiency and boosting morale.

• Upon completion, attendees will be able to learn how to manage AI consistent with their department's policies, political atmosphere and community expectations.
• Upon completion, attendees will be able to "learn how to write as well as they speak -automatically" meaning they will hear examples from departments where deployed technologies make more accurate and efficient police report writing possible.
• Upon completion, attendees will be able to hear how automated suggestions can greatly improve the manually written narratives officers generate when creating often complex police reports.

Law enforcement intelligence on criminal networks is often incomplete, with only partial segments observable. This session presents a framework for reconstructing spatiotemporal criminal networks by integrating intelligence with environmental and geographic data derived from remote sensing. It asks: How do we connect an event in one country to a coordinating event in another? The presenter will share a real-world application from a complex operational environment known for organized crime. Using network analysis, the model mapped interactions and identified previously unobserved logistical nodes. Rigorous validation by the National Police of Colombia confirmed that these predictions represent strategic nodes governed by three spatial strategies: avoidance, strategic attraction, and calculated trade-offs.

• Upon completion, attendees will be able to convert spatio-temporal intelligence data (such as radio intercepts) to build a chronological network that models and maps real-world criminal interactions in distant locations.
• Upon completion, attendees will be able to identify how a machine learning framework can be applied to this network data to predict and locate a criminal organization's previously unobserved logistical nodes and hidden connections.
• Upon completion, attendees will be able to validate the critical process of using operational intelligence to validate predictive models and how to use these newly validated insights to plan effective strategic interventions.

Join IACP as we close out the 2026 Tech Conference with a captivating panel presentation. From Lessons Learned to the Road Ahead--Shaping the Next 50 Years of Policing Technology As IACP marks 50 years of technology leadership, this presentation focuses on what responsible technology governance demands today--and in the decades ahead. Drawing on real-world experience, police and technology leaders explore how executives balance opportunity with restraint, adapt decision-making models, and build internal capability. The discussion underscores trust, accountability, and clarity of purpose as essential to guiding technology in ways that strengthen the profession.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup will be the largest sporting event in history--spanning three nations, sixteen host cities, and millions of spectators. This session explores how law enforcement and public safety agencies are leveraging technology and partnerships to prepare for this unprecedented global event. Panelists discuss strategies for interagency collaboration, real time intelligence sharing, cybersecurity, and crowd management. Drawing on lessons learned from past major events, panelists emphasize the importance of integrating artificial intelligence, unmanned aerial systems, data fusion centers, and public private collaboration. Attendees gain practical insights into the operational, technological, and organizational frameworks being developed to safeguard FIFA 2026.

• Identify key innovations--AI, IoT, and advanced analytics--that enhance situational awareness
• Learn best practices in interagency coordination and public-private partnerships
• Apply lessons from prior global events to prepare for FIFA 2026

The prevention of terrorism and targeted violence remains one of law enforcement's most pressing challenges. Violent extremism is characterized by complex radicalization processes that often leave digital breadcrumbs. This session addresses the need for effective triage of tips and leads through an examination of behavioral indicators, digital artifacts, and the potential application of artificial intelligence. Participants gain insight into behavioral indicators associated with radicalization to violence; how digital artifacts can be probative in the triage process; how closed communities and violent subcultures may manifest in digital spaces; and the potential value of artificial intelligence, including what an AI based triage tool for tips and leads might look like.

• Identify the key behavioral indicators and digital artifacts associated with the radicalization process and pathway to violence.
• Explain how digital evidence such as browser history, attack glorification, and involvement in closed communities can inform the triage process for terrorism and targeted violence prevention.
• Discuss how artificial intelligence tools may be utilized to effectively analyze and prioritize tips, leads, and suspicious activity reports related to potential acts of terrorism and targeted violence.

Following significant communications disruptions during a United Nations meeting in August 2025, a SIM card farm was discovered with the potential to disrupt communications systems across New York City. Such SIM farms can be operated by criminal enterprises or nation state actors to conduct sophisticated scams, including phishing emails, fraudulent text messages, and spoofed caller IDs. They may also be used to overwhelm cellular networks with millions of calls. In addition, this equipment can enable eavesdropping or device cloning, raising concerns about the interception of 911 and public safety communications to misdirect or endanger responders. This session examines warning signs and outlines steps agencies can take to reduce vulnerability to these types of disruptions and attacks.

• Participants will be able to identify the warning signs of a potential SIM Farm disruption or attack and the operational implications and threats.
• Participants will learn strategies agencies can use to overcome infrastructure and network challenges posed by posed by attacks on these systems.
• Participants will gain an understanding of emerging technologies to counter these threats.