The Era of the Safe City

Around the globe, most of today’s discussions on city security are quickly followed with talk of safe city projects, and with good reason. The rapid growth in urbanisation, together with the changing threat landscape, is making safer cities absolutely vital. According to a recent UN report, in 2014, 54 percent of the world’s population resided in urban areas; by 2050, 66 percent is projected to live in urban locations. Notably, Asia and Africa are urbanising faster than the rest of the world and are projected to become 56 and 64 percent urban, respectively, by 2050. Continuing population growth and urbanisation are projected to add 2.5 billion people to the world’s urban population by 2050. Nearly 90 percent of the increase is expected to be concentrated in Asia and Africa. Meanwhile, as these regions undergo rapid economic growth, more residents are able to buy vehicles than ever before. These factors combine to create more crowding in cities and potentially greater socio-economic disparities. Together with the rising threats of terror, crime, vandalism, natural disasters and traffic safety, this drives the need for more personal safety in cities. Cities need to prepare themselves for this population boom, which means putting comprehensive safety systems in place. It’s becoming increasingly important for cities to integrate disparate systems and agencies in order to gain true situational awareness for early threat detection and better control over escalating situations. By managing a city’s security posture through a single “pane of glass,” officials can respond to any incident efficiently and effectively, and then return to routine life and business operations as quickly as possible. Safe Cities around the globe With India looking to upgrade its urban areas and creating new world-class cities, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s plan to build 100 smart cities across the country is a major step towards a Digital India. The 100 smart cities assertion by the government in the Union Budget 2014-15, with an allocation of Rs 7,060 crore in the existing fiscal, clearly signals the acknowledgment given to technology in realising the Prime Minister’s digital ideas. Safe cities are about maintaining public order and safety so that routine life and business operations go undisrupted, while also creating operational efficiency. A key foundation of keeping a city safe is gaining situational awareness. At Verint, we think of situational awareness as the ability to collect, correlate and analyse a wealth of data — then transform it into actionable intelligence. This intelligence helps officials to be proactive — as opposed to reactive — and take immediate and appropriate action on suspicious activities. The ability to understand what’s happening anywhere, anytime and at any given moment is the cornerstone of situational awareness technology. Cities are dynamic, and systems need to adapt themselves to changing environments —be it city expansion and urban growth or city modernisation, emerging security “hot spots,” evolving politics and socio-economics, or other factors. Any municipal security platform needs to have the flexibility of adjusting itself to these changing dynamics while maintaining a high level of performance. For example, a city should be able to scale the solution easily to expand to other areas within the city in order to maximise safety coverage. Building a safe city can be a gradual process, in which the initial stage may involve deploying city-wide surveillance connected with license plate recognition systems, for example. The solution should be open and flexible enough to gradually integrate with more sensors, such as gunshot detection, video analytics, crowdsourcing applications, panic buttons, social media intelligence, weather sensors, traffic management systems and more, as needed. As these systems and sensors are introduced, they should be fused into a central command-and-control center to give officials a comprehensive view of a city’s order disruption landscape. City security and response policies and procedures may also adapt over time; as such, the solution should easily accommodate this evolution. Safe City funding We see a consistent increase of government and individual city funding for safe city projects. We are also seeing more projects and more teams within cities being set up to evaluate these types of initiatives. Public interest is also rising, with greater citizen engagement through smarter interaction with the community. As a result, safe city funding has increased significantly. In China alone, hundreds of cities have instituted safe city programs, and some regions are spending several billion dollars on the accompanying systems and training. In the Indian cities of Surat and Mumbai, multi-million dollars have been invested in safe city projects, and many other cities in the Asia Pacific region are following their lead. Beyond 2015 Major building blocks in every city’s growth are usually related to transportation, infrastructure, communication and more. We see that public safety is an inherent part of every city’s development and a key component to sustaining it. Just as cities are expected to invest in infrastructure, electricity, sewage, water and other ways to improve residents’ quality of life, personal safety is equally important and expected. Together with this, citizens also expect operational efficiencies from response teams when handling incidents, and ways to make it easier for citizens to report on city hazards — for example, through their mobile phones. Today’s citizens expect that the same platform used for security reports is also the backbone for city operational services and can be used to link citizens through a single smartphone application. The security community and non-governmental organisations can work together to further this paradigm. NGOs are a critical part of helping attain public safety, order and sustainability through initiatives that create a more economical and greener environment or relief work charities that support natural disaster zones. By working hand-in-hand with local authorities, their impact can be greatly leveraged through mass notification, volunteer dispatch and evacuation, and ensure smooth and efficient collaboration.