A friend sent me this very cool article about how "police and fire departments across the country are
tapping into social networking [eg. Twitter and Facebook] to disseminate information to the public." I'm rather amazed at the ingenious ways people are using social networking sites for business and public service.
Last week, the National Emergency Number Association (NENA) completed its voting to fill a vacancy on the NG9-1-1 Industry Collaboration Events Steering Committee. Devery Thumann of Motorola and InterAct’s own Terry McLarty split the vote almost equally, and as a consequence, both were elected to the Steering Committee. Congratulations to both men for being elected to the Steering Committee with such enthusiasm from your peers!
Terry will be one of the voting members of the Steering Committee that is charged with representing the interests and opinions of the vendor community within NENA’s Next Generation Partner Program Certification and Accreditation Program (NGPP C&A) as well as his obligations to the wider Committee and NENA governance.
All of you who have worked with Terry in the past knows that the Committee is in good hands with Terry on it. For those of you not familiar with Terry’s work, he is arguably one of the most innovative thinkers working on 911 Telephony Design and Engineering issues today.
Congratulations again to both Devery and Terry. You have challenging, yet rewarding, work ahead of you!
The City of Chicago recently took a step forward in improving public safety by integrating its video surveillance camera network into its computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system. This gives dispatchers the ability to take control of nearby cameras and view live footage of the situation at hand. Yet this approach still leaves security teams in reactive mode, only being able to respond once an incident has occurred and they have been notified of it through traditional channels, like a call to 9-1-1. This also presumes that a third-party has witnessed the incident and cares to report it. Have you ever heard of someone who was trespassing calling 9-1-1 on themselves?
Sophisticated video analytics would empower the city to be proactive — speeding response times and potentially saving lives. Video analytics systems are configured to automatically alert security dispatchers of emerging situations such as a person trespassing or loitering in an unauthorized area or a vehicle moving in an unusual direction. It can even automatically notify emergency personnel of an auto accident, enabling first responders to arrive on the scene much faster instead of having to rely on others to report an accident. In this scenario, video clips are automatically forwarded to dispatchers so they can see what really occurred and set a priority level accordingly.
With true integration such as occurs with InterAct Public Safety’s computer aided dispatch system, InterActCAD, and the InterAct TrueSentry digital video surveillance system, dispatchers can not only see live footage but rewind to quickly ascertain what occurred just before an incident was reported. This helps with the ability to respond appropriately to an incident, and also eliminates much of the finger-pointing that often occurs in the wake of an incident.
Video footage can automatically attached to a CAD record, and transmitted to emergency teams responding to the scene so they’re better equipped to understand the situation at hand. The video clip can follow through to the records management system, giving investigators immediate access to important visual records instead of having to cull through hours of footage to see what occurred.
This true integration would allow any city to conduct proactive policing – resulting in improved safety across the region. Check out this video that demonstrates the power of our integrated solution.
