Going to IACP 2026? Ask Every Vendor These Five Questions

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More than 16,000 law enforcement professionals are expected in Orlando for IACP 2026, October 24 to 27. Hundreds of vendors will be there too, each promising to make your job easier.

Most of those pitches will be polished. Far fewer will tell you what you need to know before signing a contract your agency will live with for the next five to ten years. The questions you ask on the floor are what separate the two.

Here's how to make the four days count.

What the Exhibit Hall Can't Show You

Many agencies don't have a technology shortage. They have a technology pile-up: CAD from one vendor, body cameras from another, records from a third, ALPR from a fourth. Very little of it shares information unless someone retypes it.

Officers spend part of every shift managing systems instead of using them. Dispatchers toggle between screens during calls where seconds count. Records staff reconcile data that should have moved on its own.

A demo on a convention floor runs on clean data, a fast connection, and a sales engineer who has given it hundreds of times. Your agency runs on a laptop in a patrol car at 2 a.m., a dispatcher in the eleventh hour of a shift, and systems that were installed before some of your officers were hired. The gap between those two environments is where technology investments fail.

Five Questions That Separate Promises From Proof

Take these to every booth worth a second look. Pay attention to how specific the answers are.

1. How does this work with the systems we already have? If the honest answer is that everything has to be replaced, you aren't buying a product. You're buying a multi-year migration.
2. What does implementation actually look like? Ask for the timeline, the training hours, which of your people it will pull off their regular duties, and what it will cost after year one.
3. Which agency like ours is using this right now, and can I call them? Similar size, similar structure, similar budget. A reference from a department ten times your size tells you very little.
4. What changed in the product last year because an agency asked for it? Vendors who listen can name examples. Vendors who don't will talk about their roadmap.
5. What happens when it fails at 2 a.m.? Who answers the phone, how fast, and do they understand what a CAD outage means on a dispatch floor?

A vague answer is still an answer.

Modernizing Doesn't Mean Starting Over

One of the most expensive assumptions in public safety technology is that modernizing means ripping everything out. For most agencies, it doesn't.

The CAD system your dispatchers know well may be worth keeping. The cameras you bought three years ago may have plenty of service left. What usually needs to change is how those systems connect, and what gets added on top of them.

Keep what works. Change what doesn't. Add what's next. That's how Coreforce approaches every agency we work with, because a technology plan that writes off your existing investments is a plan your council, commission, or county board is unlikely to fund.

Test It With the People Who Will Use It

The best test of any public safety system is whether an officer can use it under stress, in bad light, without stopping to think about it. If a tool needs a refresher course every quarter, it's adding work, not removing it.

So build your evaluation around the people who will live with the decision. Put the product in front of a patrol officer, a dispatcher, and a records clerk before you buy it, not after. If you can, bring one of them to Orlando. Ten minutes of their reaction at a booth will tell you more than any spec sheet.

At Coreforce, we put the human in technology. That means designing around how officers, dispatchers, and command staff actually work, so the system fits the job instead of the other way around.

Let's Talk in Orlando

Every vendor in Orlando will have a good demo. The ones worth your agency's time will also have good answers.

Coreforce will be at IACP 2026, and we'd welcome the chance to answer those five questions for your agency, specifically and with references you can call. Stop by our booth #1581, or book time before the show so the right people from our team are there to meet you.