IDC’s Smart City North America Awards program has recognized public safety innovation since its inception, and this year’s competition brought in some of the strongest entries yet. Across the public safety category, five cities and one regional airport demonstrated how they built operational capability around constrained budgets, growing service demands, and the evolving capabilities of artificial intelligence and unmanned systems.
AI adoption challenges in public safety
Given the focus on AI in many of the award nominations, the following data points from IDC’s U.S. Government Buyer Intelligence survey provide important context for the city summaries below:
- First, data privacy and security concerns ranked highest, with 52% of respondents citing them as a central issue. Budget constraints and digital infrastructure gaps tied for second, each noted by 44% of public safety respondents—significantly higher than the rest of government. Half of public safety agencies allocate just 6–10% of total IT spend to AI, leaving little room for expansion. This makes integration both more critical and more difficult to fund.
- Second, 48% of public safety agencies name data privacy and security as their top AI security priority, compared with 39% across the rest of government—a 9-point gap. AI-generated misinformation (44%) and audit and accountability (42%) round out the top concerns. Agencies that produce evidence for legal proceedings and operate under civil rights oversight are right to prioritize data privacy and security.
- Third, public safety agencies are struggling to scale. Eighteen percent have not attempted to scale any AI initiative—almost four times the rate of other government agencies.
Against that backdrop, this year’s winners did what our survey data confirms is rare: they integrated next-generation technologies across systems most agencies leave disconnected, governed them with genuine accountability structures, and measured results against operational outcomes that justified the investment. Drumroll, please…
The 2026 award entries
The headline this year belongs to Scottsdale, Arizona, which took home the Overall Winner award—the top distinction across all categories—for its AI-Powered Real-Time Crime Center with Drone-as-First-Responder program.
The program’s strength is integration: Scottsdale’s Real-Time Crime Center brings together more than 5,800 cameras, citywide license plate recognition, gunshot detection, body-worn cameras, and drone-as-first-responder capabilities into a unified intelligence platform. When a 911 call comes in, drones deploy first, delivering aerial and thermal imagery to officers before they arrive on scene. The system has logged more than 70 drone missions and supports thousands of incidents annually.
Equally notable is the governance model: the system activates only on verified incidents, with no blanket surveillance and full audit trails.
The Public Safety category winner was the Phoenix Police Department, recognized for its Unmanned Aerial Systems Program—a methodical, department-wide buildout that has grown from 11 pilots at launch in 2022 to a fully staffed unit in 2026.
PPD flew more than 12,500 missions in its first two years, covering everything from search warrant service and surveillance of violent offenders to crime scene documentation and major event overwatch. The program began as a collateral-duty assignment and matured into an embedded patrol capability, with 24/7 coverage launched in late 2025 and beyond-visual-line-of-sight operations planned for 2026. The department made a clear case for cost-effectiveness: fewer officers managing more complex situations more safely, with measurable reductions in overtime reliance.
Scalable innovation in practice
The finalists round out a strong field. Phoenix also entered its Real-Time Operations Centers—two precinct-based intelligence hubs established in 2023 that support patrol officers with live camera feeds, gunshot detection analysis, license plate data, and rapid criminal history checks. From January 2024 through mid-2025, the RTOCs helped recover 369 stolen vehicles, recover 191 firearms, and process more than 7,900 intelligence requests.
Mesa’s Police Department took a different angle on the AI question, applying it to the unglamorous (but consequential) work of crime classification. Mesa processes more than 66,000 incident reports annually for federal NIBRS (National Incident-Based Reporting System) compliance—work that previously required an 11-person team and still produced a chronic two-week backlog.
A proof-of-concept AI classification system processed 60,000 historical cases and achieved roughly 90% consistency with human analysts, with full audit trails on every decision. Mesa projects saving 15,000 analyst hours annually. The system also helped leadership identify an anomaly in aggravated assault data that turned out to be a reporting methodology artifact, not a real crime trend.
Midland, Texas, addressed an older but equally critical problem: the Permian Basin region’s four major public safety agencies could not reliably communicate during major incidents. The city’s transition to a P25 simulcast platform aligned Midland’s infrastructure with Odessa, Midland County, and Ector County, creating shared talkgroup templates and joint governance. The 2019 Midland-Odessa mass shooting had exposed the fragility of the region’s communications posture. The interoperable system went live in September 2025 across 4,312 total subscribers.
Finally, Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport (CVG) demonstrated that the public safety challenge is not unique to law enforcement. CVG deployed a Bluetooth-based micro-location platform across its 7,700-acre campus to address a straightforward but underserved problem: where workers and assets are in real time—without GPS dead zones and without surveillance overreach.
The result has been measurable improvements in asset visibility and lone-worker safety, with emergency alerts now reaching personnel who previously had no radio access.
What sets leaders apart
The pattern across all entries is clear: the most effective deployments paired operational rigor with clear outcome measurement. Just as importantly, the cities that built governance frameworks alongside their technology investments achieved the most durable results.
