Featured article for Chief of PolicePublic Safety in the Real Time City: Data Driven Policing

Two weeks ago, a large fire occurred in a warehouse complex in the waterfront district. While the city’s emergency management and fire departments worked to extinguish the fire, the city’s Chief of Police was also hard at work.  Apart from helping to evacuate the area around the scene, there was a question around whether the fire was an accident or the result of criminal activity.  Later in the week, this reporter had a chance to interview the Chief.

Q: The Chief of Police is frequently the community focal point when a significant public safety incident happens.  This is often when you make a statement.  But the public rarely gets a glimpse into all the things you do behind the scenes.  What’s your role in an event such as the warehouse fire?

A: In the warehouse fire, or really any type of public safety situation, my primary responsibility is to protect the community.   This could mean evacuating people from dangerous areas, like we did for that fire.  And it also means investigation.  I need to figure out what, if any, criminal activity is associated with any given public safety incident.

Q: So what’s the biggest challenge that you face?

A: Honestly, it’s resources, which correlates to budget of course.   My budget determines what resources I can deploy to protect the community and cover the everyday public safety needs of the city as well as respond to emergencies like the warehouse fire.   Budgets are finite and I always feel I never have enough resources to cover all of the contingencies I face.  So my every day challenge comes down to making decisions about how to best use my resources – my people, technology, funding, etc. -- most effectively.

Q: Information and decision making sound like they’re close to the heart of your role.  Does technology help you do your job better? 

A: Technology has changed the way I work in lots of ways and that change is for the better.  For example, through some of our systems, I have access to a variety of data that provides much better situational awareness for me… and it’s close to real-time.  When I can get information and understand it faster, then I can act on it rapidly.  It also helps my division commanders collaborate and share analysis.  As needed, it helps monitor and track mission details around an event or emergency like that warehouse fire, so that I can make smart decisions on who and what to deploy, and when and where to deploy them.   

Q:  Beyond helping you manage the immediate response to the fire better, how else are you using technology?

A: Well, we also have information systems that help officers, detectives and analysts work on investigations…like the one going on to try to figure out if the warehouse fire was intentionally set or not.  At the scene, my officers interviewed several witnesses and collected data.  Later they reviewed video from public cameras in the area, as well as some footage from officer body worn cameras that was collected around the time the fire was set.  They even analyzed social media from the time around when the fire was first reported.  This generated a lot of data and the investigative team used our technology to organize and search through all this data quickly, using several different criteria. The team also searched information databases and was able to find connections to a similar warehouse fire last month in another jurisdiction.

When we’re investigating any suspicious or criminal activity, technology helps because tactical leads are generated faster.  The quality of the evidence gathered is also better because in the data, relationships can be established:  we connect the dots more easily, and make all this evidence, and our conclusions, available to the courts.  

Q:  How does this help reduce crime?

A:  It helps reduce crime because we can do more work, better and faster.  For incidents like that warehouse fire, the technology helped us to visualize data gathered in the warehouse vicinity on interactive dashboards and maps.  We analyzed the video data with time sequence playbacks.  We centralized all this data in one system and that enabled my officers to unearth nuggets they may have otherwise missed.  And, we can share our data and work across the department and with other jurisdictions with the confidence that the data is encrypted and secure. 

Q:  Does the technology make the community any safer?

A:  It makes the community safer because it keeps officers on the streets.  Some of the capabilities the technology enables are mobile, so my officers have access to information in their squad cars, or on their mobile devices.   All in all,  they are spending more time on the streets and less at their desks – which is one way I know that I am using them more effectively.  The technology is a force multiplier so my officers can do more. It all goes back to solving my number one challenge:  using my resources as efficiently as possible to do the best job I can to protect the community.

Q:  It sounds like you’re convinced of the utility of the technology.  Did it take you long to adopt it?

A: I was skeptical of some of the systems at first.  Using them seemed like more work, not less, and in public safety there is little to no time for errors.  But now that we are through the learning curve, I see that what the technology gives me is more information than I ever had before.  And while it can’t make decisions for me, I use it with confidence to support my decisions.  Making smart decisions is the heart of the job and the systems we have today help in lots of ways including when I and my commander staff are reacting quickly to emergencies and when we need to use data forensically to help speed up investigations and also using key analytics to help better plan for resources. And at the end of the day, that’s how we best serve our community.

This article was written to discuss how big data management and analytics enables Chiefs of Police do their jobs better.  The city and Chief of Police in the article are fictitious, but the author thanks IBM’s Corky Jewell, Retired Major at Georgia State Patrol, for his insight and guidance about some of the challenges that Chiefs of Police face on a daily basis, and how analytics technology helps them to meet them.

Featured article for Emergency Management DirectorsEnabling Emergency Management in the Real Time City: The Future is NOW!

Two weeks ago, Fire Services reported an explosion in a large warehouse complex in the waterfront district. The explosion was heard by residents across the city.  According to the incident commander on scene the thick, turbulent, black smoke pouring out from the complex was highly toxic.  This fire was dangerous, but by the time morning rush hour started, the city’s first responders had the fire extinguished.  Later in the week, this reporter had a chance to interview the Director of Emergency Management about his role in working with several agencies to manage public safety incidents.

Q:  Whenever a public safety incident happens, we hear mention of the “Director of Emergency Management” mentioned a lot, but the public never sees you.  What’s your role in safeguarding the public?

A:  My job is to be in the center of things, to gather information and coordinate with other people and departments, and sometimes other jurisdictions.  There are people working for me, including logistics and operations people, finance people and planning experts, and they are all relying on me to coordinate information and resources.  It’s my responsibility to share insight and to help others make better decisions.  Lots of lives and millions of dollars’ worth of assets are at risk if I don’t do my job well.  But if I do, then I can help save lives and limit losses.

Q:  What’s your biggest challenge that you have to deal with?

A:  I’ve got two:  not having great situational awareness and imperfect integration across agencies and their systems.  If I can’t get enough good information, and can’t see the forest for the trees, then I can’t make the best decisions.  And if I can’t communicate across systems, then incident commanders and field personnel can’t act on my advice.

Q:  It seems like information is critical to doing your job, but there seems to be so much going on at once.  How do you keep up with all this information and use it effectively?

A:  You’re right, having information and being able to use it to get the big picture, that’s one of most important things about my job.  I have to be constantly up to speed to maintain 360-degree situational awareness.  Everything is priority #1.  From alerting the right people to bring the right resources, from the right places, at the right time, to thinking about how the weather will impact my response and envisioning all the cascading implications of my decisions … I need to pay attention to a lot, all the time. 
 
Q:  With all this information and all of your responsibilities and demands on your attention, how do you keep up with it all? 

A:  Well, I’ll tell you, I’m far better off at doing my job now than I was even a year ago.  Back then, I’d have lots of data from video, from sensors and from personnel on scene.  I was even getting unstructured data feeds from media reports and from bystanders using Twitter.  But it was hard to keep it all organized, harder to extract good, meaningful insight from it, and even harder to be confident that I was making the best decisions from it all. 

I have all this data and more today, and it’s arriving in near real time.  But the difference is that I’m using some technology in the command center to help me organize my data, get some real insight out of it, and it helps me make better decisions. 
 
Q:  What does the technology help you do?

A:  In the command center, the technology boils down to helping manage and visualize all the data feeding into the center.  It enables me to engage and collaborate with field personnel and it lets me do “what if” analyses. 

Q:  Can you tell me more about the capabilities you have today, that you didn’t have before?

A:  Sure.  First off, the software in the command center system integrates data from all the different sources that are feeding into the center.  What comes in from field personnel, dispatchers, weather data, surveillance camera feeds and even the social media I mentioned before. As it’s integrated – and this is happening in real time – the system flashes alerts that are categorized and prioritized automatically.  If there’s anything significant, then it gets escalated and can be flagged for additional attention.  

Second, the system also tracks the alerts and if it detects a pattern, then we can see patterns that we would never have seen before.  Having the big picture view is critical and the analytic tools in the system do things like illuminate the interdependencies between things.

One of the best things that the system analytics let me do is to prescribe the best solution to complex problems.  We can align operating procedures with the alert patterns, to enact response and recovery plans, and do this across jurisdictions that are tied into the system.  For instance, a fire situation could consume a lot of resources, but I don’t want to focus everything we have on it…there could be lots of other situations that arise.  Analytics will help me plan how many personnel should be kept in reserve to protect the rest of the city. Maybe one of the greatest capabilities I have now is to be flexible and update actions as things change in a situation.  Tactically, I can collaborate with other people and white board “what ifs”, literally using maps and drawings to work out responses as things change.  And, we can get these results out in the field as soon as we’re ready with them.

Q:  This certainly sounds like you’re better off than you were before.  Is there anything that you can’t do now that you wish you could do? 

A: These analytic tools are as important to me today, as my radio and computer were a few years ago.  When personnel are equipped with technology that’s connected and interoperating, that helps me make the most of the available data.  It makes me more intelligent about the situation and how best to coordinate it.  In the big scheme of things, the more people and assets that are connected and sharing data, the better my awareness and decision making is.  But, not everyone is connected, so even though I’m better off than I was, there’s still room for me to improve.   That’s what I’d really like, is to get everyone interoperating and working from the same, true, operational picture.

This article was written to discuss how big data management and analytics enables Directors of Emergency Management do their jobs better.  The city and Director of Emergency Management in the article are fictitious, but the author thanks the very real Dr. Gary Nestler of IBM for his keen insight and guidance about some of the daily realities that Directors of Emergency Management face, and how analytics technology helps them.

Open Data Transforms Public Safety Outcomes and Creates New Opportunities

Increasing numbers of cities and countries around the world are learning the value of making government data pools open and available to the public. These initiatives create platforms for community engagement, stimulate innovative solutions to civic issues, and boost economic activity. Open data has been embraced by municipalities both as a mechanism to better respond to public safety emergencies and to more mundane, but equally resource-intensive tasks such as monitoring bylaw violations. For example, open data enables geospatial modelling of traffic violations to better allocate limited resources to hotspots around the municipality.  The growing success of these initiatives has led some governments to release data specifically focused on policing, traffic, critical infrastructure and other relevant categories in order to improve public safety.

While the concept of open data continues to gain traction, not all governments have successfully developed their open data initiatives. For example, the Kenya Open Data Initiative (KODI) was launched in 2011 to some fanfare, with analysts expecting that this initiative could lead to grassroots innovation in public safety. Instead, it faced considerable criticism because of its slow uptake. More specifically, public sector employees and municipal politicians actively resisted releasing high value municipal data, largely because the initiative lacked a clear policy framework to govern the release of data. Decision-making power over the release of open data was concentrated within the most difficult to reach executive branches of government, and these agencies typically worked in silos, resulting in inconsistent data formatting and different data release cycles. Uptake was therefore slow and inconsistent, and until KODI’s recent relaunch, it served as a cautionary tale indicating that simply building an open data portal is not sufficient to drive use and adoption.

The muddled open data policies hindering the performance of the KODI project contrast sharply with the policy framework that Chicago instituted alongside the launch of its own open data project. In 2012, the mayor of Chicago issued an open data executive order with the aim of creating an ‘unprecedented’ level of transparency and accountability.  This policy framework provided concrete guidelines for the dissemination of public data and immediately produced measurable results, amassing more than 16 million page views.

Three key provisions in Chicago’s policy contribute to its success:

• An open data advisory group, to be chaired by a Chief Data Officer, was established. (Chicago was, in fact, the first major municipality to appoint a CDO.)
• The advisory group oversees and coordinates the release of data from government agencies in consistent and cross-compatible formats.
• City agencies are mandated to provide an annual report to ensure their open data compliance.

The public safety data available through Chicago’s initiative includes hundreds of databases detailing longitudinal crime reports, information on policing districts, fire stations and more. The City of Chicago honors the applications developed using the open data that the City provides on its Digital Hub page. These public safety applications range from the relatively straightforward, measuring weather and water conditions on Chicago’s beaches or creating a visual map of current 311 requests, to the more complex, such as the SmartData Platform, which uses sophisticated analytics to enable leaders to see trends in crime and other public safety metrics.

The success of these applications demonstrates how a coherent policy framework that encourages the release of open data can produce positive change and measurable outcomes for public safety in the city. Additionally, these applications have the benefit of reducing the burden on city administration and streamlining otherwise cumbersome processes. Other jurisdictions around the world are following Chicago’s example in embracing the power of big data and analytics to create a measurable and positive impact on public safety.

Opportunities on the Horizon

Even as some municipalities embrace open data, many more struggle with harnessing the transformative power of big data. The success of these projects hinges on two guiding principles:  (1) creating effective partnerships between governments and businesses, and using them to ensure the expertise and technology necessary to facilitate widespread uptake and citizen buy-in, and (2) establishing a clear, transparent policy framework that makes data available for everyone to use.

Following these principles, cities can take a series of “next steps” to implement an effective open data program:

• Establish an advisory group to oversee and coordinate the release of open data. This approach bridges the gap between government agency ‘silos’ that proved disruptive in the rollout of Kenya’s open data project. Consider adding two levels of group membership: one which is comprised of city staff, and another which is comprised of technology partners and non-governmental agencies. Two layers of membership will ensure data validity and greater applicability.
• Ensure that data formatting is cross-compatible and interoperable for maximum usability. Leverage well-established standards such as ISO 8601 and upcoming standards such as ISO 37120. Network with other municipalities and advocate for widespread adherence to these standards during the data entry and data release processes. This will reduce data cleaning costs and help create open data compatibility across municipalities.
• Work with a set of trusted technology partners to develop a coherent open data policy, and use this opportunity to administer an ICT platform that marries disparate sources of data into a manageable and interoperable format.
• Increase automation in the process of producing open data. For example, automatically scan each data set and provide a statistical quality measurement score, then encourage and reward improvements to that score.

Adopting these measures will drive open data progress and innovation. As the field of smart public safety brings stakeholders from multiple municipal bodies together, partnerships formed can lead to new opportunities to improve public safety and address issues that cross municipal borders, such as weather emergencies. As cities in developing and developed countries continue to realize the potential of open data for improving public safety, they will be most successful when working with partners to aid them in in their transformation into smart cities. 

Body Cams: Extending the Point of Impact of Intelligent Video Analytics

The concept of smart public safety involves applying data management, analysis, and collaboration processes to multiple types of data, to deliver deeper insight into all manner of things impacting public safety.  Digital video is information rich and it can be a critical source of insight. 

Video analytics is the technology to extract insight from digital video.  It tags video images creating data and applies advanced analytics to that data, which can be either archival or streaming in real time.  The power of video analytic solutions is that they have the capabilities to recognize and analyze events that humans may miss.  Adding these capabilities to collaboration technology can complements traditional law enforcement and emergency management skills.  Video analytics can deliver targeted intelligence to improve situational awareness to front line personnel.  Moreover, it can help them identify threats in real-time, as well as detect patterns that can help predict, and ultimately prevent, crimes. 
  

The New Frontier of Digital Video

Video surveillance data can derive from many sources, including archived footage, stationary cameras, sensors and, increasingly, field units such as dashboard cameras (“dash cams”) and body worn video (“body cams”).  Body cams are the new frontier of digital surveillance video and have the potential to be critical components of smart public safety programs. 

These devices were first introduced in the mid-2000s in select European cities in Great Britain and Denmark.  Adoption in North America began a few years later, gaining increased momentum in the past two years across the U.S and Canada.  A 2014 study of the 100 most populous cities in the U.S. found that 41 have deployed body cams to at least some of their officers, while an additional 25 cities have plans to deploy them. Some of the cities leading this charge include New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Miami and Washington, DC.  Similarly, police forces in large Canadian cities such as Calgary, Toronto and Edmonton are leading the country’s efforts in deploying body cams to their officers.   

Benefits, Concerns and Solutions

The benefits attributed to body cams include increasing officer accountability, reducing use-of- force incidents, reducing citizen complaints against officers, and decreasing attacks on officers.  These benefits suggest that police and citizens are reacting positively to this new dimension of public safety.  Body cams remind police and citizens that they are being observed, inducing a state of heightened self-awareness that broadens their perspective.  The mere presence of a body cam on an officer can help deescalate tense situations and cool down confrontations. 

At the same time, citizen groups and police associations have raised concerns about the use of body cams by officers.  Both cite privacy issues that need to be discussed, understood and guaranteed in accord with civil rights.  Under what circumstances, for instance, can video be made public?  What’s the balance between privacy for citizens and transparency for police?  There is no consensus approach now, but guidelines and regulations are under discussion so it is only a matter of time before a social and regulatory solution emerges.

Another issue with body cams is the cost of the devices themselves, and of storing the massive data files that accumulate.  Here, a technical solution may help address the issues.  By combining body cams with video analytics, public safety organizations can gain additional value from the devices and offset the costs of using them.  Applying analytics to body cam generated video, for instance, can increase situational awareness for the officers on the ground, potentially saving property and lives.  It can also guide commanders’ decisions to deploy personnel most effectively in response to real-time updates in a given situation.  This combination can also increase the efficiency of existing resources, enabling one person to do the work of many.  Ultimately, body cams + video analytics can be a force multiplier for police commanders.

Improving Public Safety with First Person Technology

Adding the first person perspective of body cams with the insight delivered by video can be a powerful enabler of smart public safety.  Right now, we’re at the earliest stages of exploring the capabilities and value afforded by this combination.  As the adoption of body cams spreads and the concerns around the technology are addressed, the benefits will increase.

Much of this new, emergent value is likely to be found when the insight derived from body cam digital video is merged with other tools, such as department- and city-wide operational dashboards that help manage resources, facilitate decisions, and coordinate action.  The promise of video analytics is compelling, and when combined with first-person technology such body cams, it has the potential to vastly improve the way cities maintain public safety.

What the Emergency Management Experts Are Trying to Tell You

Staying on top of industry news isn’t easy. There are hundreds of reports and insights released every day across the web, and we don’t all have a personal Watson to help us process information. To help you get to what really matters, we pulled out the top three insights from IBM Emergency Management experts.

“Be consistent in your approach.”

Stephen Russo is Director of Public Safety, Law Enforcement, and Emergency Management Solutions at IBM. In his blog on improved crisis preparedness , he calls out the need to approach both “day-to-day community incidents” like unplanned power outages and planned festivals with the same set of tools and techniques you would use for a crisis situation, like a natural disaster. In his experience helping government and public safety organizations implement emergency management technology, he has found that maintaining a consistent methodology allows first responders and staff to “engage immediately and naturally in response” because of their familiarity with the tools involved. He advises that the best emergency management approaches integrate modern analytics, social and mobile technology to further enable the fastest possible response –for events big and small.
 

“Your four phase plan needs an update.”

Emergency management plans often hinge on the four phases of the emergency management cycle – preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation. With the new capabilities of advanced data & analytics solutions, though, these phases get an upgrade. This blog post outlines all of the new, streamlined improvements each phase of the cycle gets with the help of an effective tech solution. During preparedness, predictive analytics can make “what-if” scenario planning possible. For response, necessary data can be integrated and made available to key officials even when infrastructure is down. Communications processes can be automated. During recovery, analytics can help ensure resources are deployed where they are most effective, as well as track the success of recovery plans over the course of years. Value is brought to each part of the cycle, but in the end, “the real effects of these new [technology] solutions are felt when they operate cohesively across all four phases”.

“Don’t let your data live in silos.”

Did you also get riled by the poor emergency management planning Jurassic World? (Why did they need a T-Rex sized door?) So does Jen Q. Public in this blog post where she advises on a smarter approach to emergency management. Her top recommendation? She advises “pulling data from disparate sources into a common view [to provide] critical information” at the point of necessity. An integrated view of data allows patterns to be detected that could warn of disasters in advance, and also allows departments to work together faster and more effectively when responding.

Want more tips from the experts? Check out the IBM Big Data Hub.

What exactly is Intelligent Video Analytics? An introduction

Heard industry leaders talking about intelligent video analytics? It is revolutionizing the way public organizations ingest and glean value from video content sources. Below, we break it all down for you—from origin to application.

How it developed

The first intelligent video analytics programs were primitive compared to today’s versions. Algorithms were applied to video to detect motion and the location of that motion on live feeds. As Frank Yeh, Senior Solution Architect for intelligent video analytics at IBM explains in his blog, “Turning video into insight”, these early programs weren’t actionable. Operators didn’t want or need an alert any time any motion occurred. There was no way to distinguish between the motion that required notice and usual activity. “False alerts” became all too common.

In a second, more advanced wave of intelligent video analytics software, this was corrected. Modern programs provide great detail on detected motion including color, shape, size, type and more. Frank explains, “Instead of ‘something’s moving’ you now get ‘a red car is moving eastbound on 33rd Street’ or ‘a bald man with eyeglasses wearing a red shirt is walking down the hallway.’”

As more video cameras are purchased, placed and used for public safety, the development and application of intelligent video analytics has increased tenfold, enhancing a diverse number of applications.

Why it works

How does intelligent video analytics provide value beyond traditional surveillance systems? Curt Brobst, an intelligent video analytics evangelist at IBM, explains that video monitoring systems relying on just human operators to identify action of interest are inherently flawed. While recordings of video can provide insight into an incident afterwards, they do not successfully enable early detection and response while the incident is still occurring.

This is because we humans have limited attention spans. The typical human attention span while watching video is a cool 22 minutes. Even the most dedicated operator is still subject to “perceptual blindness”, or the brain’s tendency to screen out actions in order to help us focus. Even if an operator maintains focus, perceptual blindness could prevent them from noticing unexpected activity.

As Curt explains, “Video analytics is never sleepy, inattentive or distracted. It isn’t overwhelmed by trying to keep track of dozens of video feeds. It isn’t affected by perceptual blindness. Rather, it monitors all video feeds 24/7, notifying human operators when something of interest happens.”

How it works

There are four key steps to developing and achieving value from an intelligent video analytics surveillance system—capture, ingest and analyze, decide, and act. All four are outlined in detail in this blog post. Implementing a system according to these steps affords a number of benefits. Resources are more effectively managed; as video sources increase exponentially, the cost of personnel to monitor all incoming content would be prohibitive. An intelligent video analytics system would manage and tag the incoming data, and make it available and easily used by multiple departments—breaking down informational silos. This allows departments to analyze and understand events before, during and after they occur.

A few applications…

New applications and case studies are appearing regularly as the value in this new information is really brought to light. A few examples include managing traffic flow for a city—on a regular basis and during planned or unplanned events like parades or emergencies. In public safety, intelligent video analytics is helping respond to crime, understand crime patterns and even to predict where and when resources need to be deployed to have an impact. As Frank notes, with intelligent video analytics, “retailers can better understand customer behavior, and banks and airports can understand queue waiting times. The possibilities are virtually endless.”

Interested in learning more about how analytics are creating a safer planet? Check out posts by experts on the IBM Big Data Hub.