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Dave is a professional business developer & proven subject matter expert resource with extensive ‘hands on’ commercial experience & business development success, combined with technical engineering credentials, in the international high technology homeland security marketplace. He has specific experience of developing businesses in the transport surveillance, Safe Cities & CNI markets and is an acknowledged expert in the field of CCTV & Surveillance technologies with proven business development skills managing multi million $ sales projects.
August 4, 2014

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Commonwealth Games: How Safe Cities Prepare for Threats During Major Events

SONY DSCThe recent Commonwealth Games brings into focus the verity of situations modern Safe City ‘systems’ need to cope with.

The technology is often seen as the answer to the prayers of municipal authorities and control centre operators.

But it must always be seen in the context of its intended purpose and what ‘risk’ the technology is there to mitigate.

Classic threat and risk assessment 101 work, but it is worth pointing out as the technology we have available today may or may not be appropriate to deliver benefits to operators of these new safe city systems and with the vast amount of data available to review, are we overcomplicating situations?

Terror attacks

The headline-grabbing terror event is one that anyone in public safety hopes will never have to be ‘put into operation’. Unfortunately it does happen there are usually big associated budgets that we can use in systems design.

All well and good and it’s right to review these threats to cover them appropriately. Things are never 100% in these assessments but at least we can undertake the appropriate risk assessments and collaborate with other ‘departments in the know’ to keep this assessment up to date.

CCTV is often the ‘800LB Gorilla’ in the data systems room, so to speak, and we must understand what it is we are trying to ‘watch’ and who we’re sharing this information with as this will significantly impact our data networks, storage systems and operational procedures – not to mention potential cyber security impacts that large-scale IP-based surveillance systems need to consider.

As with the 2012 Olympics, major events give municipal and public safety authorities an opportunity to better review the various threats they may face in putting on a major event on the global stage.

Everyday threats

It’s also not all about terror threats either. The everyday aspects of traffic control, crowd control, weather emergencies as well as transport emergencies or failures that are all too familiar to city dwellers can be more problematic during major events.

Systems designers must take into account the need to share information across ‘silos’ and ensure that departments that need the information also have the correct infrastructure, procedures and access to the information.

Many natural disasters could have been mitigated had key departments been alerted to developments more rapidly.

It’s also not just about sharing information; that information must be communicated in the right format, so standards become essential in any major systems design. Chain of evidence and use by judicial systems may also demand consideration in any system, large or small, including in the systems architecture mix.

Social media

Growing use of social media means systems also need to monitor ‘trends’ on social platforms to be as forewarned as possible about security threats.

And they must be capable of ‘uploading’ information from a multitude of end-user media (mobile phones, tablets, etc), through which users frequently post photos or footage of a vital piece of information. Take the meteor strike in Russia, for example, which was captured by numerous ‘dashcams’ that became a fad among Russian motorists.

Public safety agencies (police, national security and ministries of the interior) must consider not only which surveillance assets – whether in the city centre, transport, public sector, border agency etc – they have direct access to, but also indirectly through the very capable systems now being deployed by private users and members of the public via their personal communications devices!

And if you think that a 30,000-city wide camera system generates a lot of data over 31 days, just imagine the input from members of the public when invited to document an unfolding event. And imagine the logistics in forensically analysing this!

Major events offer opportunities to stand back, review your needs in various scenarios and how to avoid national embarrassment.

However, these events happen every day, event or no event. Planning how to deal with them as part of a major event’s legacy therefore has lasting benefits – which just shows how every major city should plan for them regardless of whether they’re hosting major events!

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