How Big Data Works For Safe Cities
By Kevin Wine, Vice President Marketing Americas, Video & Situation Intelligence Solutions, Verint Systems
The need for heightened security and comprehensive solutions has become apparent as we continue to see a rise in threatening situations occur around the world, such as active shooter incidents, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters. The simple fact is that we no longer live in a world that can be kept safe by law enforcement alone. Intelligent technologies and Big Data analysis have become increasingly important in helping to escalate security efforts to best protect cities and the citizens who reside within them. The combination of large amounts of valuable data and identifying information on potential threats can help regions achieve true situational awareness. The evolution of data capture and Big Data analysis enables officials to quickly and effectively identify threats, manage emergency situations, and investigate incidents more efficiently and effectively.
Urbanization has driven thousands, sometimes millions, of people to large metropolitan areas. The rise in city populations across the globe not only drives opportunity but it leads to increased vulnerabilities to threats that place the safety and well-being of citizens at significant risk. To manage these risks, public safety, law enforcement and intelligence agencies must adopt a more comprehensive approach to safety, one that includes methods to identify warning signs of unrest and violence. Real-time information gathering and 24/7 monitoring allows the gathering of intelligence and evidence to provide timely and efficient response.
Safe city programs are being developed across the globe. Such efforts include the incorporation of strategic sensors and devices that aid in the rapid identification of potential risks. Such technology solutions allow cities to collect and analyze information faster. But often times, the volume of information collected from these systems can be overwhelming to operators while the sheer richness of captured data can make it difficult to identify what is important and what is not.
To fully manage security operations, the solutions and technologies put in place must provide a greater level of preventive intelligence. This level of insight increases the opportunity for proactive detection of risk — a necessity given the global threats received against various countries and cities on a daily basis.
Consider an emergency situation in which information is flowing in from various sources, making efforts complicated to manage. Timely and relevant information must be immediately available, handled with great efficiency and allow support staff to stay focused on the responsibilities and tasks assigned. Rather than manually correlating this large amount of data from numerous disparate data systems, a growing number of cities are unifying them all into a single command-and-control center with a single interface, which helps enable early detection of threats which can be used to initiate better planning, more timely response and ultimately better decision making.
Unified security management solutions are valuable in helping cities collect and analyze important data to deliver actionable intelligence and greater situational awareness. Centralized management programs allow operators to realize a comprehensive view of a city’s risk landscape by delivering a correlated view of security infrastructure such as video surveillance, video analytics, alerts, social media intelligence, traffic systems, weather sensors and more. By integrating these various systems and sensors into a centralized resource, municipal leaders are able to maximize analysis, response, investigation, evidence gathering, incident reconstruction and debriefing, enabling security personnel to plan better, as well as coordinate and share data as necessary.
With Big Data analysis and comprehensive situational awareness, security and public safety personnel are able to achieve Actionable Intelligence to drive new levels of public safety. Through implementation and deployment of this intelligence, cities around the world realize the true benefits of a centralized data and security structure through lowered crime rates, and systemized and timely responses to harmful and threatening situations.