What Is Situational Awareness in Public Safety?
Situational awareness is the ability to know what is happening around you, understand what it means, and anticipate what comes next — in time to act on it. In public safety, it is the difference between running an incident and merely reacting to it. When commanders have it, decisions are made on reality. When they don’t, they’re made on fragments, assumptions, and memory.
What are the three levels of situational awareness?
The widely used model, originating with researcher Mica Endsley, breaks situational awareness into three levels. Each maps cleanly onto a real incident:
1. Perception — what is happening
The raw inputs: where units are, what the video shows, what dispatch is reporting, where the subject is. If you can’t perceive it, you can’t act on it.
2. Comprehension — what it means
Turning inputs into understanding: this is a containment problem, that intel changes the risk picture, those two reports describe the same person.
3. Projection — what happens next
Anticipating the next move: if the subject exits the rear, who covers it; if this escalates, what does the tactical plan need to be. This is where experienced commanders live — and where good information makes them faster.
How does situational awareness work in practice during a major incident?
Early in a major incident, the defining feeling isn’t a lack of information — it’s being overwhelmed by it. Reports come in faster than they can be sorted. Resources arrive and need somewhere to go. The scene is changing while decisions are still being made about the last version of it.
Situational awareness is what lets a commander take that chaos and impose order on it. In practice, they’re doing several demanding things at once:
- Organizing the resources they have — knowing what’s on scene and putting it where it’s needed.
- Predicting the resources they’ll need — calling for the next units, teams, and support before the gap becomes a crisis.
- Assessing risk continuously — to officers, to the public, to the subject — as the picture shifts.
- Problem-solving in real time — adapting the plan as new information lands.
All of that competes for the same attention. Every minute spent hunting for information — chasing an update, reconciling two reports, asking who’s where — is a minute not spent on risk and decisions. The job of good situational-awareness tooling is to take the organizing burden off the commander so their attention goes to the part only they can do: assessing risk and solving the problem.
Why does situational awareness break down during an incident?
The failure usually isn’t a lack of information — it’s that the information is fragmented. On a growing incident:
- Video lives in one system, sometimes only in the aircraft or with one pilot.
- Assignments live on a whiteboard at the command post.
- Intel is scattered across CAD comments, texts, notebooks, and verbal updates.
- Investigators, patrol, and tactical teams each hold a different slice.
Every one of those tools works. They just don’t work together — so no single person ever holds the whole picture, and the version they do assemble is already behind the incident.
What does real situational awareness require?
Achieving it operationally — not just talking about it — takes three things:
- Every source in one place. Live video and the incident plan together, not on separate screens.
- Live sync. The moment the picture changes, everyone sees the change — no briefing lag.
- Every role, one view. Patrol, command, tactical, investigations, and leadership all working from the same current information.
That combination is what turns scattered inputs into a shared operational picture — the practical form situational awareness takes in the field. The picture is the tool; the awareness is what commanders act on.
How does situational awareness tooling fit with incident command?
Situational awareness and incident command are two sides of the same operation. Awareness tells you what’s happening; incident command software is the workspace where you act on it — tracking resources, assignments, perimeter, and intel in one live-synced view.
BabbarOps delivers both on the same platform: every feed — drones, aircraft, cameras, witness phones — on one wall, paired with a live-synced incident command workspace, available to everyone with a need to know from first response through resolution. Not a slogan about awareness; the live picture that produces it.
Situational awareness is the ability to know what is happening around you, understand what it means, and anticipate what comes next — in time to act on it. In public safety, it is the difference between running an incident and merely reacting to it.
The Endsley model defines three levels: (1) Perception — the raw inputs, what is actually happening; (2) Comprehension — what those inputs mean together; and (3) Projection — anticipating what happens next in time to act. Each level depends on the one before it.
The failure is almost never a lack of information — it’s that the information is fragmented. Video in one system, assignments on a whiteboard, intel across texts and notebooks. Each tool works in isolation, but no one holds the whole picture, and the version they assemble is already behind the incident.
Situational awareness is the cognitive state — knowing what’s happening, what it means, and what comes next. A common operating picture is the practical tool that enables it: a single, shared, live view every role works from. The picture supports the awareness; the awareness is what commanders act on.
Real situational awareness requires every source in one place (live video alongside the incident plan), live sync so the moment the picture changes everyone sees it, and a single view every role works from. Platforms that combine live video feeds with a shared incident command workspace come closest to delivering this in practice.
The Endsley model, developed by researcher Mica Endsley, defines situational awareness as three sequential levels: perception of elements in the environment, comprehension of their meaning, and projection of their future status. It is widely applied in aviation, military operations, and public safety command.
BabbarOps gives every role the live picture they need to act — drones, aircraft, cameras, and witness video on one wall, paired with a live-synced incident command workspace. See it working with your assets.
BabbarOps is an independent commercial product and is not affiliated with or endorsed by any law enforcement agency.