Public safety is a challenge for cities, universities, stadiums, retailers, and many other public and private organizations. As urban areas continue to become more crowded, security operations teams are under enormous pressure to prevent security incidents with limited resources.

This growing concern for public safety requires new technologies that evolve situational awareness from simple video recordings and information sources to AI-powered edge devices that can analyze and respond to data in real time.

In this post, we’ll discuss the importance of leveraging real-time data to improve public safety, and why this poses challenges for law enforcement and safety personnel. We’ll also cover how smart physical security devices can bring new efficiencies to surveillance operations.

The Flood of Data for Public Safety

Many municipalities and organizations have recognized the need for better data to improve public safety, which has led to a flood of data from social media, mobile phones, edge devices, and many other sources. In fact, video cameras and other IoT sensors are being deployed in nearly every public space to assist with crime investigations and safety efforts.

Despite this abundance of data available for public safety, there are significant challenges involved with managing, storing, protecting, and analyzing it. This requires robust infrastructure that can handle large volumes of data, ensure data quality and accuracy, protect sensitive data from cyber threats, and provide real-time data analysis capability.

The problem is that many law enforcement and security teams have too much data and not enough personnel to analyze it and take action. Alarms, alerts, calls for service, video feeds, and other systems can overwhelm public safety personnel instead of aiding them in quickly responding to threats. Turning data into actionable insights is the key to scaling security operations efficiently and economically to meet the needs of today’s cities and public areas.

Public safety teams need AI technologies to cut through the noise and bring efficiency to incident management and response efforts. This includes systems that can automate data analysis and decision making processes, which would significantly reduce the workload of security teams.

How Smart Physical Security Devices Help

Smart physical security devices seamlessly combine AI software with edge hardware to streamline surveillance operations. Since AI applications can sift through the data to generate insights during and after security incidents, law enforcement and security personnel can respond to incidents much faster.

One of the most common edge devices smart cities are adopting is video cameras as part of AI-powered IP video surveillance systems. These intelligent video management systems use computer vision to identify specific people and vehicles of interest and flag abnormal activity. This helps security operators and law enforcement respond to threats faster, which is critical in high-risk situations where every second counts.

Video surveillance systems could also integrate with intelligent access control systems to trap perpetrators based on real time insights from video data. Rather than human personnel trying to manually track the perpetrator across different video feeds, the AI-powered system could automatically lock sectors by predicting movements in real time. This brings a new level of situational awareness and efficiency to surveillance operations, which would greatly improve the safety of public spaces.

Delivering Physical Security Devices with MBX

AI and software vendors often struggle to integrate their innovative security applications with the appropriate hardware. Since graphics cards and processors are improving at a rapid pace, choosing the right components to deliver smart devices with optimal performance and extended lifecycles is challenging. It’s also hard to bring truly plug-and-play solutions to market, which is crucial for adoption by municipalities and other organizations.

MBX Systems is a hardware specialist that offers strategic guidance for designing, building, and integrating complex devices. We also have over 50 predesigned reference platforms for physical security devices that are researched, tested, validated, lifecycle managed, and standardized for optimal performance. This portfolio includes IP video recording servers, access control servers, analytics and AI servers, compute servers, client workstations, and video storage arrays.

We also have an in-house engineering team that can design different architectures to meet other smart device requirements. Altogether, MBX’s capabilities help technology developers completely offload their hardware program so that they can focus on developing innovative AI applications for physical security.

Learn more about delivering AI-powered solutions with MBX in our latest whitepaper: Physical Security for Smart Cities.