The concept of what constitutes a “secured city” has been converging with other urban drivers since our group here at SouthComm’s Security & Public Safety Group launched the Secured Cities Conference back in 2011. Initially, the goal of the event was to highlight what law enforcement agencies and others in the public safety sector needed to know to create new and smarter solutions to ensure municipal security, including ways to harness information to better understand situations, how to respond faster to threats and maximize the use of video surveillance.
Data visualization, real-time collaboration, and credible analytics can help agencies monitor city areas, predict and respond more effectively to incidents, streamline information sharing and collaboration in the management of major events and emergencies.
As cities work with the private sector to gradually implement new competencies and technologies, the increased information-sharing and unified communication efforts are helping them to establish solutions that help identify successful outcomes and assists in developing preventive tactics.
But now “secured” has morphed into “smart” technology and strategic partnerships. In a recent conversation with Steve Surfaro, a 30-year security industry veteran who is currently Axis Communications’ Industry Liaison and Chairman of the ASIS Security Applied Sciences Council, we discussed where Smart and Secured Cities are today and where they might be in the near future.
“With the City of Houston in mind, if we were to compare projects where strategic public/private, agency/vendor, agency/company-city tenant were highlighted, it would become clear that legacy, individual ‘pockets’ of single function projects have morphed into fewer and often just a single, cohesive solution where technology has sensors producing diverse data for many different users and agencies,” explains Surfaro. “For example, a visible light, positionable camera, plus a thermal imaging camera on a private company’s rooftop, will today feed data and incident awareness for law enforcement, detection of individuals in a crowd for Fire and EMS responders, and tactical data like ballistic detection trajectory for SWAT.”
So now that we are seeing the concept of the Smart City converging with the values of a Safe & Secure City, how will we see them co-existing when it comes to issues like law enforcement, governance, and public/private partnerships? According to Surfaro, it all comes down to money and sustainability.
“With multiple large platform providers like IBM and Microsoft dipping their toes in the Smart City industry, there will be greater opportunities for these partnerships to form, but agencies are wary of testing closed systems that they will ultimately have to leave should the private companies they serve have evolving needs,” Surfaro says. “Then in comes the concept of the multi-solution provider working group. Both your SouthComm group and the Security Industry Association have formed frameworks and groups of like-minded solution providers interested in a better way to deliver key smart city systems like traffic incident management, crowd management, and energy monitoring.”
Surfaro points out that at the time of this writing, the Pacific Northwest finds itself experiencing extraordinary temperatures like 104°F in Portland and 99°F in Seattle. With power substations operating a full capacity for many days continuously and often at design limits, the use of simple temperature monitoring from overwatch cameras can save a power outage affecting neighborhoods or worse yet, entire arenas, hotels, and convention centers. He adds that there were also hundreds of fires threatening homes, so sensors monitoring the temperature of agriculture, trees and large areas of land can save crops, food, people are used to conserve water.
“Critical incidents aside, a Smart City, often managed by ‘Innovation CEOs’ that work together with first responders create systems that improve the operation and quality of life for the city’s tenants. For example, the use of a traffic incident management system that not only detects a vehicle accident but recognizes unstable traffic flow before a crash occurs is not only favorable but sustainable,” says Surfaro. “If you as a consumer know you can easily, safely and quickly arrive and return from a city commerce area, you will be more likely to give that city its business. Just like a major airport operation’s mantra of ‘get them in, get them out’ as quickly and safely as possible, so goes the smart city. For the system like traffic monitoring, a necessity to maintain commerce and first responder access, that’s sustainability.”
