The Top 7 Benefits Of Building Situational Awareness In Safe Cities

By Eran Wachman, Vice President of Product Business Development, Verint

Safe city initiatives are rapidly becoming the best way to build an effective and proactive security posture while allowing increased collaboration between city officials, security leaders, law enforcement, and first responders. Close partnerships between these parties allow cities to effectively identify current threats while learning and analyzing data points to be best prepared to address future risks. Safe city initiatives help cities achieve true situational awareness — both in routine times and during emergency situations — by aggregating a large amount of data and turning it into actionable intelligence. The correlated information then enables officials to quickly and effectively identify threats, manage emergency situations and investigate incidents.

Here are seven benefits cities can tangibly observe in implementing a safe city project.

1. Citywide Data Analysis. Today’s IP-based systems and sensors can span large geographic areas and the ability to combine information from these once-siloed technologies allows cities to realize new levels of awareness while tapping into rich data sources to help ensure safety and optimize operations. For example, operators can send picture of a suspect from the surveillance video cameras in high-risk areas directly to a patrol officer’s mobile device, and the officer can then easily access the suspect footage on his or her smart devices. Operators can also leverage geospatial location data to pinpoint the location of security events and deliver this data to local agencies to optimize response and collaboration.
2. Innovative Detection Techniques. How is situational awareness obtained? It’s through the combination of multiple processes, solutions and technologies, and aggregating information from these sources to gain the most accurate information available about a situation at any given time. Technology tools are a valuable component of building high levels of situational awareness. Operators can leverage security data to direct law enforcement to potential high-risk situations, mitigating the likelihood of potential violence in some cases. Surveillance analytics allow law enforcement and security officials to quickly pinpoint when an individual breaches a protected area and can also be used in post-event analysis to determine trends.
3. Efficient Data Management. By grouping together data streams from audio, video, mapping, and other relevant systems onto a single solution, cities can gain valuable information from captured data. When combined, multiple data points can establish the possibility of further threats and outline accurate identification of suspects in multiple incidents. These solutions can help law enforcement agencies take action or investigate more rapidly.

4. Communication. Command centers need to quickly disseminate urgent communications to help responders and citizens remain alert and aware. With mobile communications, cities can quickly and efficiently engage with its community, often issuing announcements and warnings via smart device applications. Command and control centers can also interface with law enforcement, using real-time communications for efficient dispatch and distribution of information to guide forces in the field.
5. Interagency Collaboration. When information is combined into one interface, video and other data sources can easily be shared with other agencies, as needed, to orchestrate an effective response. Additionally, built-in workflows help ensure standard procedures are followed. Various agencies can utilize data from a number of sources in both the public and private sector — that is, private citizen cameras — leaving these public/private partnerships strengthened. This allows city officials to share data with private businesses and vice versa to coordinate security efforts and patrols appropriately and cost-effectively.
6. Debrief Events Effectively. Authorized personnel can monitor multiple radio channels or calls from their desktops in real-time and play back contents in a matter of seconds, helping to quickly confirm details and review conversations that were difficult to understand. By implementing replay of audio, video, text, screen data, telematics, and related data onto a single screen, security personnel can facilitate effective debriefing and improve performance for future incidents.
7. Citizen Engagement. Today’s cities are now using an integrated network of publicly and privately owned cameras to monitor events. But cameras are by no means the ultimate solution to achieving heightened levels of situational awareness, citizens are. The driving force behind every safe city initiative is citizen engagement. Each person is a walking sensor that can report on security threats, watch the public domain for shared threats and share valuable input. With the rise of smartphone use across the globe, mobile phone users can capture high-definition photos and videos. In an emergency situation, data from citizens proves to be valuable in helping mitigate risks and ensuring effective response. A centralized solution can be used to capture reports, photos, videos and other data, to then combine with existing security information, to help enhance evidence collection and accelerating investigations.

Ultimately, situational awareness in safe cities is about receiving incoming data, analyzing it, and turning it into actionable intelligence. Recent terrorist attacks and active shooter incidents demonstrate this need for advanced intelligence solutions and Big Data analysis to improve preparedness. By building situational awareness into the overall security posture of a city, growing cities are better able to manage incidents and identify potential threats before they happen. Solutions resulting in greater situational awareness allow cities to stay one step ahead and help security officials protect their cities and its citizens.