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Chicomm Blog

Every City Faces Unique Security Threats. How Prepared Is Yours?

Posted by Lisa MacGillivray on Tuesday, June 9, 2015

Is your city safe?

Many cities are asking this question. Safe City initiatives are on the rise around the world due to unique, ever-evolving and complex threats. As populations grow, so do the size and intricacy of the infrastructure required to support them. Municipalities must be able to respond with a citywide, unified approach to safety and security.

Implementing comprehensive command-and-control solutions to improve situation awareness, gather actionable intelligence and more effectively respond to incidents have become essential to growing urban populations such as those in Surat City, India, and Guayaquil, Ecuador.

On any given day, officials in a city of any size are tasked with some combination of the following:

  • Crime and vandalism prevention
  • Active shooter response
  • Riot and crowd control
  • Fire and natural disaster mitigation
  • Terrorism detection and prevention
  • Public facility security at schools and government buildings, on public transit and more
  • Temporary and event security

Detecting and Responding to Threats

The most successful Safe City installations utilize multiple intelligence systems that include video surveillance and management, license plate recognition, force management and dispatch, panic buttons, GPS tracking systems, environmental sensors, user-driven reports and more.

However, multiple systems generate significant amounts of data from upwards of tens of thousands of devices, systems and sub-systems - all of which can quickly overwhelm operators. Therefore, a unified and correlated security structure is necessary to detect, evaluate and respond to incidents effectively.

Traditionally, the technology didn’t exist to achieve a single command-and-control platform that gathered all relevant information. Security operators would have to manually hunt through isolated systems, such as video surveillance, license plate recognition and GPS tracking solutions, to make decisions. Each device only showed a part of the overall security picture - and required significant resources for manual monitoring and correlation with all other systems.

Today’s command-and-control technology eliminates this time-consuming process by helping enable operators to centrally manage multiple data sources with a single command-and-control platform. Now when they receive an alert, operators can immediately start monitoring the area and instantly dispatch forces in the region, helping to enable faster and more accurate response action, better visibility and better decision making with actionable intelligence.

Assess Your City’s Preparedness

How prepared is your city to prevent, detect and investigate the many threats that it faces on an ongoing basis?

Assess you city's threat preparedness.

 

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The following is a guest blog post written by Brian Matthews of Verint, a global leader in Actionable Intelligence solutions, and one of Chicago Communications' partners.