Alison Brooks, IDC’s Research Vice President for Smart Cities and Communities Public Safety, highlights key ways cities can apply smart city technology to improve public safety now and into the future.

Why is Public Safety such an Important Aspect of Smart City Initiatives?

A safe city is a prerequisite to a smart city. All the layers of a smart city — civic infrastructure, civic engagement, intelligent transportation — must be founded on the bedrock of safety. If people don’t feel safe, they will not come to the city to live and work. Cities are working with vendors like Spectrum Enterprise to improve public safety response times, enhance the security of public spaces and ensure the public’s overall sense of safety.

How Can Smart City Technology Improve Incident Response?

Smart technologies can help cities decide which resources to deploy at the right time for the right people. For example, police officers might use a digital ride-along application, which can help them quickly learn important information during an incident, and get specialized help when necessary.

Body cameras are also a vehicle for creating a better understanding of what is going on in the field. These initiatives give us better granularity into the data. They also create a transparent record for both citizens and police officers.

How Can Smart City Initiatives Improve Situational Awareness for Public Safety Officials?

People often think of public safety as cops and robbers. But it is really about avoiding danger. We are seeing more focus on using smart public safety initiatives to increase situational awareness. Cities acquire and analyze data to immediately turn it into actionable intelligence.

Barcelona, Spain, for example, does remote waterworks inspections. This once very dangerous job is now done safely using drones, which retrieve the necessary data, allowing officials to decide what next steps need to be taken to maintain that infrastructure.

In addition, we know Spectrum Enterprise is working with smart cities on public safety initiatives that range from security surveillance to panic buttons, Vision Zero and situational awareness.

Situational awareness lets cities stay one step ahead. City officials can now be proactive when it comes to public safety and the identification of potentially dangerous conditions, rather than being reactive to safety incidents.

How Can Cities Build Support for Smart Public Safety Initiatives?

While residents are keen to take advantage of “intelligence everywhere” in a consumer capacity, they are not always keen on government intelligence or surveillance everywhere. We are seeing a “techlash” where people are concerned about how technologies are being used to track and surveil them.

Public safety officials need to build citizens’ confidence that technology tools will be used appropriately. One city, for example, deployed digital first responders. These are drones that come to the scene of an incident before personnel arrive. They can communicate with people in distress and track fleeing criminals. The police department worked to build community confidence in its ability to use this technology appropriately. The department did this by carefully crafting deployment policies around acceptable use, including very strong punishment for misuse.

What’s on the Horizon for Smart Public Safety?

We are seeing agencies use smart technology to radically rethink the public safety workflow. Cities are integrating processes while also leveraging next-generation technology. For example, the Dutch National Police are piloting forensics testing lab vans, which travel to crime scenes to process forensic and digital evidence. This circumvents the needless processing times involved in getting this data to and from a traditional lab, and allows police to generate leads more quickly.

We are seeing many cities reinvent their workflows in similar ways. This is a return to first principles to understand why we do things a certain way. These kinds of questions are important to ask across agencies to enhance the efficiency and success of public safety initiatives.