Page 20 - Campus Security & Life Safety, July/August 2019

active shooter
pixinoo/Shutterstock.com
20
campuslifesecurity.com | JULY/AUGUST 2019
Proactive Security for
By Clayton Brown
Active Shooter Situations
Intelligent security solutions take campus security from reactive to proactive
“You can’t stop something Yyou don’t see coming.”
ou can’t stop something you don’t see coming. So how can campus security be anything but reactive to active shooter situations? Intelligent security might be the answer.
By combining the best insights of humans and technology, campuses can establish a proactive security strategy to mitigate the impact of active shooter events, if not antici- pate and avoid them altogether. Advances in
AI, video analytics, sensors, and wearable technology already provide the tools neces- sary to make this a reality. What’s missing are the intelligent insights and “awareness” to tie them together.
See It Coming
There are many ways to detect an individual on the “path to harm.” One way is by deploy- ing video cameras with enhanced video ana- lytics capabilities that include facial recogni- tion, license plate identification, loitering and object left behind detection.
With increases in computing power, facial
recognition technology has become an increasingly viable and affordable solution to implement, allowing campuses to identify a “person of interest” as they approach the perimeter, and to issue an alert in advance of a potential attack.
This might have helped in Parkland, where the perpetrator was already on a watch list. The suspect was known to be dan- gerous enough not to be allowed to bring a backpack on campus, and was expelled one year before the shootings. Although a secu- rity guard saw the shooter approach the cam- pus with a duffel bag that day, there was no