The Balance Of Intel: The New Need In Emergency Response

Scrolling through After-Action Reports of mass shootings, it becomes a natural evolution to want more information than we traditionally had available during an event. Our first leap was seeing what information we could get by incorporating technology. The new challenge is how to present it. We now have the capability to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to ingest data at lightning speed, from 100s of camera feeds, license plate readers, and even drones. The issue that remains is that the end-user, a living person, can only process and analyze at our “human” rate.

A debate that got my attention during the last Marjory Stoneman Douglas Commission hearing in September 2021 was the questions regarding camera feeds from within schools. The process of integrating cameras from all schools directly to police has been an arduous task that has yet to be completed. Moreover, the question begged: When they are integrated, who will be responsible for analyzing them??

An opinion was raised that 9-1-1 Operators should be sifting through the feeds while receiving live information. The ones who disagreed with this were the operators themselves, who advised they are already saturated with information to process from calls. How do we take all this new technological intelligence and deliver it so that it is still fast? The answer is still technology.

We don’t want to view 50 cameras streaming live. What we want is the one camera that shows us the suspect. Computers can instantly sift through all 50 feeds from start to finish. We have existing technology that can find shirt color, a gun in someone’s hand, or conduct facial recognition searches. Fifty cameras can get narrowed to one faster than a human can process. In the end, we have what we need, which is a live view of a suspect. This process can be applied to every saturation point.?

I enjoy our team’s development model at CERA and it has been effective in coming up with realistic solutions. Filled with everyday First Responders, teachers, and students, our team will honestly say when the saturation point hits in receiving information. It is there that we do our “stop, drop, and engineer.” We build to absorb the stress and time and leave our end-users to do what they are there to do, which is to succeed and save lives. I, for one, am excited to see the capabilities.