A look at some of the new challenges for urban security surrounding the role of physical security systems in the face of information overload and too many unconnected systems
by Cisco
Safety and security is a top priority for city government. Citizens look to government to deter crime, and to respond promptly and effectively to crimes in progress, natural catastrophes, terrorism, and threats to critical infrastructure. Cities that succeed in creating secure urban environments attract more residents and businesses, fueling economic development. They can also decrease costs associated with investigating and prosecuting crime. Urban security is becoming more complex, however, even as government budgets contract. Protecting people and assets requires 21st century technology to address challenges that did not exist even a decade ago:
Too many separate systems are making it difficult to ‘connect the dots’. City governments have wisely invested in systems for video surveillance, building access control, motion sensing, fire suppression, and more. The drawback is information overload. Required to monitor multiple consoles, operators can and do miss significant events that are obscured by dozens or hundreds of false alarms each day. And operators cannot easily correlate alarms from different systems to assess event severity, because each system has a separate monitoring console.
In most government security operations centers, alarms are not integrated with communications systems. Unable to forward alarm information, video, and maps to first responders and city executives, security personnel must resort to verbally relaying the information or typing it into emails or paging systems. The time required to manually initiate communications and repeat relevant information delays response, and the inability to share images, video, and maps impedes situational awareness. What’s more, city officials and first responders cannot communicate directly because they have incompatible communications devices.
Cities today must protect citizens and businesses from a variety of threats, including crime, terrorism, attacks on critical infrastructure, natural catastrophes, and other emergencies. Now cities worldwide are using 21st century network technology to protect citizens, employees, and assets more effectively:
- increasing situational awareness by tying together information from all alarm systems in one place
- accelerating incident detection by filtering out false alarms
- automating response, saving valuable time
- enabling collaboration within city government, with partner agencies, and with the public sector
Increasing interdependence
In the 21st century, protecting citizens, property, and the local economy requires collaboration with organizations such as petrochemical processing and distribution centers, seaports and airports, and major stock exchanges. City government and these private-sector organizations need to share security alerts, and quickly link their video surveillance systems when necessary. In Illinois, the City of Joliet Police Department has addressed this challenge. The department has deployed video surveillance cameras along the waterfront, and can share video with the state Department of Transportation if barges cause damage to bridges.
Keeping citizens informed about safety and security incidents helps to increase safety and avoid panic. City government needs solutions to disseminate alerts and emergency updates to citizens on their phones, smartphones, and on digital signs in high-traffic areas.
Disparate security systems
Now city governments worldwide are using their IP networks, the same one they use for Internet access and business applications, to tie together their different security and communications systems; automate incident detection and automate response; and enable collaboration with government and private organizations. Integrating the various security systems used in city government accomplishes three important goals:
- reducing time between incident detection and response
- empowering human operators to make decisions based on all available information
- disseminating the right information to the right people, at the right time.
Open platform
The open platform for safety and security is an architecture framework for building solutions to prevent, prepare for, respond to, and recover from incidents. The framework provides guidance on how to combine technologies to address major safety and security challenges, including urban security as well as crisis management, border control, safety at mass venues and events, secure public transportation, and prison and probation issues.
The urban security architecture enables cities to:
- unify operations across multiple agencies
- acquire communications interoperability and keep information confidential
- collaborate effectively within and across local communities
- provide surveillance, monitoring, and incident control
- increase law enforcement agencies’ awareness of urban activity
- enhance communication between government and citizens
An example is the Cisco Connected Physical Security Suite of products and Proximex Surveillint, offering a complete picture of all security activity in a single view, in real time. The suite includes video surveillance and IP cameras, physical access control, and IP Interoperability and Collaboration System (IPICS). Cities that use this solution can gain the following capabilities:
Actionable intelligence
Accelerate event detection and increase situational awareness: situational awareness is provided by collecting all information that city security personnel need to make informed decisions and respond to incidents. These information sources might include video cameras, video analytics software, motion sensors, fire alarms, weather control stations, gunshot detection software, incident video that citizens capture and submit with their mobile phones, citizen posts on social networking sites, and more. The system processes the aggregated alarms to create actionable intelligence.
Reduce false alarms: It is not uncommon for outdoor cameras to generate 10 or more alarms per camera each day, caused by wind gusts, vibrations from trucks or trains, moving leaves, and camera malfunctions. Time spent assessing and dispatching resources in response to false alarms increases government costs. And in environments with dozens or hundreds of cameras, operators might miss one of the few valid alarms, increasing the possibility that a significant event will go undetected. Surveillint reduces false alarms by correlating alarms from multiple systems. For example, a city can configure the system to flag an alarm as high severity only if both a fence sensor and video analytics alarm are generated. Alarms not validated by another system can be automatically acknowledged and marked as false. Conversely, if multiple alarms are received, from a video camera, door access control, and smoke sensors, the system will issue a critical-severity alarm and use the city’s business rules to dispatch the appropriate first responders using the Cisco IP Interoperability and Collaboration System (IPICS).
Fuse all security information about a particular incident based on event location: Security operations personnel can locate events on a map, and then drill down to view relevant video, alarms, citizen reports, and so on (Figure 1). An operator in the security operations center who receives an alarm from a fire detection system, for example, can click on the map to view video from nearby cameras. Using the same interface, the operator can take the appropriate response depending on whether the video shows smoke, fire, people huddled over a person who appears to have a medical emergency, or a person running away from an alarm pull station. The operator can also see the location of resources on the map, and send the video and alert information to one or more people.
Automatically communicate with the appropriate people, according to the city’s policy. If the video captures a fire at City Hall, for example, the system sends an alert plus relevant video to the people the city has specified, perhaps the Mayor, security operations personnel, and Fire Department. Surveillint integrates with IPICS, which can automatically set up a virtual talk group and invite specified people to join using any type of radio as well as phones, mobile phones, and laptops with the appropriate software. Operators can use the same console to transmit alarm information, video, and maps to first responders’ and city executives’ smartphones or laptops, and to keep citizens informed through emails and text messages.
Case study
A U.S. railway transportation provider needed to protect its maintenance yards from copper theft and vandalism. The agency had invested in multiple physical security technologies, including Cisco Video Surveillance to manage video feeds from fixed, pan-tilt-zoom, and long-range cameras from multiple vendors; video analytics software; IP intercom emergency notification; and radios. The motion detectors generated too many false alarms to be useful, because people constantly enter and exit the property. The agency wanted to empower security personnel to make faster, more informed decisions based on security policy and procedures.
The agency achieved its goals by tying together all of its investments to increase situational awareness and filter out false alarms. For example, when the video analytics software senses an event captured by one camera, it sends commands to the Cisco Video Surveillance Manager to aim the PTZ cameras to that area. This gives the operator two views of the same event, increasing situational awareness.
Operators only need to monitor one console, Proximex Surveillint, to monitor alerts from all physical security systems. Surveillint displays a satellite view of the facility, which operators can use to drill down for a closer view of reported threats and alerts. The system presents only the pertinent video feeds from Cisco Video Surveillance Manager, plus pertinent alarms. Filtering out irrelevant information helps operators focus in on significant events. After an incident, the system automatically generates reports with different levels of detail as appropriate for different managers, based on the organization’s own rules.
Since implementing the system, the agency states it now assesses events within 30 seconds of alarm receipt. Response times have decreased by as much as 90 percent, and report preparation time has decreased by approximately 60 percent.