John Ryle, Manager, Campus Security Solutions, Hexagon highlights the importance of situational awareness and visualization of security technologies in a single interface for schools and campuses.

The campus setting

The scene repeats itself each new term on college and university campuses.

Families arrive with their teen prodigies, settle them into a dorm room and leave them to begin their journey to scholarship and adulthood.

It’s much the same on K-12 campuses, where parents drop their children off daily into the care of teachers and administrators.

Implicit in these scenarios is the parents’ hope that they’ve left their children in safe hands.

Understanding this concern, schools, colleges and universities assure the parents and students that this is the case and proactively work to provide a secure environment – a utopia of learning and life-skills development.

However, today’s campuses have evolved into complex environments that require multifaceted security systems.

University campuses are essentially self-governed cities with hundreds of buildings and miles of real estate to manage.

The facilities – from halls filled with classrooms to residential dorms, sports facilities and parking lots – have unique security requirements.

On sports gamedays, the campuses are inundated with alumni and visitors, bringing new security challenges.

K-12 campuses are smaller versions, but can be similarly difficult to secure.

Meanwhile, incidents of campus violence and unrest have increased, as has the investment in campus security measures.

In simpler times, lock and key access mechanisms and patrolling security personnel were the standard on campuses. That’s not enough anymore.

Security expansion

One of the largest shifts in campus security began over a decade ago with the implementation and large expansion of video surveillance.

This growth in video footprint, paired with complementary technologies such as high-definition cameras, digitalization of video recordings and most recently the advent of analytics, has significantly enhanced campus security.

In parallel, schools of all sizes made shifts to digitalize access control – shifting away from traditional lock and key access to smart card technology embedded in student and staff ID cards.

With this digitalization and modern visualization of individuals’ movements across campus, access control has become a critical tool and asset for campus safety.

Other tools have also become standard in security for educational facilities.

Emergency communications systems such as blue-light boxes that connect a caller directly to emergency services, mobile applications and web-based incident reporting tools have all been added to physical security ecosystems across campuses.

Identification management systems and visitor management systems, especially in K-12 settings, have also radically improved campus safety for students, faculty and visitors.

This modernization movement brings its own challenges.

With multiple security systems to oversee, including camera systems, fire control, mass notification systems, records management and more, campus security is often underfunded and built on outdated IT infrastructure.

Situational awareness

The advent of a physical security ecosystem for education campuses makes it difficult to achieve manageable situational awareness.

Consolidating disparate physical security and operational platforms into one interface – a single pane of glass, so to speak – has become an issue for many schools and universities.

When security teams must detect and respond to events, working across multiple applications simultaneously can drastically reduce response times.

With tools from multiple manufacturers with different layers, processes and workflows, more time can be spent gathering accurate information than responding to events before they escalate.

Similarly, post-incident investigations and reporting can be slow and inaccurate, with data points spread across multiple tools and individuals.

Accuracy and timelines are paramount to meeting internal regulations and federal mandates such as the Clery Act, which requires colleges and universities to report campus crime data.

So, consolidating and streamlining physical security operations has a major impact on campus safety.

With budgets and resources not growing at the same rate as security needs, improving situational awareness for operators and officers is critical to enhancing campus security.

By tracking and responding to incidents through a single platform, schools can respond more effectively and more accurately create compliance reports, simplifying a typically complex and time-consuming process.

It’s also important to integrate campus security systems with a computer-aided dispatch platform, either on-campus or through a partner public safety agency.

That direct interface can drastically improve response times and facilitate coordination and collaboration when a multi-agency response is required.

Another security innovation is the advent of digitized standard operating procedures (SOPs), which equip operators with step-by-step dynamic procedures for resolving real-time incidents.

Whether those procedures are as simple as a denied security badge or as critical as an active shooter situation, digitized SOPs ensure a standard, proper response amid chaos.

Video analytics

When incidents occur on campus, detection time is critical.

Every second that passes from the onset of an incident to officers responding and ending a threat has real implications.

Schools are challenged by their visualization of tools – from cameras to gunshot detection and license plate recognition – to identify threats as quickly as possible.

Manual viewing and scanning of hundreds, even thousands of camera screens, door sensors and blue-light box notifications is a slow, antiquated process.

Finding the right tools, the amount to deploy and the locations to place them is challenging.

Simply adding more tools can have an adverse effect if deployed improperly, creating confusion and time constraints in critical moments.

However, with video analytics technologies integrated into a well-coordinated system of systems, operators have a consolidated view and can relay more accurate information to first responders.

That improves the efficiency of security responses and allows campuses to return to normal operations sooner.

Video analytics and metadata search tools allow operators to quickly locate specific individuals across campus and track them in real-time or through recorded footage for complete situational awareness.

Operators can use these tools to search for specific attributes, such as what color shirt the individual is wearing, whether they are wearing glasses or carrying a backpack to narrow and expedite the search greatly.

In addition, mobile capabilities allow security personnel on patrol access to real-time, full-motion video directly on mobile devices, allowing them to assess situations on the way and react faster.

Orchestrated response

No single aspect of a physical security ecosystem can be more critical in response effectiveness than efficient visualization.

While security tools have grown in accuracy and function, the representation of their physical location on campus continues to be challenging.

Antiquated, 2D maps, including hand-drawn, manually created image files, are still commonplace in education security and policing.

With tools and Internet of Things (IoT) sensors being placed by the hundreds or thousands, understanding the exact location and surrounding context of their alarms is a critical factor in their effectiveness.

The advent of 3D mapping and tools such as LiDAR, once only used in other parts of universities such as geological exploration and mapping, are becoming the vanguard of campus security ecosystems.

Digital twin technology takes visualization to the next level.

By creating digital twins (real-time, interactive 3D representations of the campus), security teams can enhance situational awareness regarding physical features and individual movements in the area.

This next-generation mapping technology also allows for more precise planning of future security tools like cameras and alarms.

Digital twins allow operators to monitor all security devices in one view.

Tools such as advanced perimeter monitoring and intrusion detection enhance campus surveillance beyond traditional video setups.

These solutions can also be leveraged by other departments, such as maintenance, planning and construction, broadening the value of the 3D-mapping capabilities.

In many cases, the operators are students or young adults who quickly adapt to navigating 3D models because of their familiarity with gaming.

Without utilizing the most modern and visually detailed mapping tools, campuses reduce the effectiveness of all the tools and sensors invested in, deployed and counted on during critical events.

Collaboration with off-campus agencies

When a major incident happens on a university or K-12 campus, it becomes a multi-agency operation, with campus police or security officers, local and state police, fire and rescue and emergency medical services all responding.

When that happens, efficient communication and collaboration are crucial.

Each agency often operates on its own systems, making real-time communication between multiple partners problematic.

The solution is a cloud-based collaboration platform.

Collaboration portals can host multiple agencies, allowing them to share data from disparate systems and see the same common operational picture.

All that’s needed to participate is an email invitation, a modern web browser and a high-speed internet connection.

Collaboration portals can also have AI capabilities that analyze data from computer-aided dispatch systems, sensors, video feeds and other inputs.

When the AI spots a trend or anomaly in event data, it alerts stakeholders to help them quickly uncover related incidents or patterns.

Modernized for safety

In short, a seamless campus security plan is impossible without modern tools for situational awareness, visualization and analysis, all tied into a complementary ecosystem managed through a single interface.

When a crisis arises, things can become chaotic and people working with uncoordinated and inadequate systems can become overwhelmed.

That can result in injuries, fatalities and compliance issues, leading to negative media coverage and a bad reputation for the institution.

The good news is that those outcomes can be avoided if today’s state-of-the-art digital tools for safety and security are employed in an integrated and efficient ecosystem.

This article was originally published in the December edition of Security Journal Americas. To read your FREE digital edition, click here.