Police Priority, based in Charlotte, N.C., announced that security platform company Global Guardian, out of McLean, Va., is using its Cooperative Alarm Sharing Transmission (CAST) product and that a dozen large monitoring companies have agreed to pilot it.
Global Guardian released a statement explaining, “Last fall, Global Guardian was seeking a solution that would advance and enhance our market share of the alarm monitoring market (event monitoring). Clayton Kemp, CEO of Police Priority Inc. introduced their new product, Incidentcode.com to us. The timing was right, it involved the latest technology applicable to alarm/event monitoring operations, allowed us to create added value to our clients and increase our revenue streams. From installation, integration to employee training, it was a smooth transition.”
Syed Rehman, director of engineering and IT with Allied Universal and Response Center
(THRIVE Intelligence), one of the monitoring centers planning to use the product, said, “We are planning to make video of active incidents available to responding police officers in a timely manner. Law enforcement will have assistance in determining if there are enough units responding to the threat, will they need to take preventative measures before they arrive on scene, will they need to contact other agencies?”
Police Priority describes itself as a software company dedicated to protecting life and property by improving the distribution of actionable intelligence between alarm monitoring stations, law enforcement and end users.
During an active threat, the CAST technology immediately gathers and centralizes meaningful actionable intelligence such as video, audio and camera GPS coordinates from the monitoring center’s automation system(s) or other disparate systems. As the actionable intelligence is being gathered, CAST temporarily renders a simple homogenized user interface that can be accessed via any Internet browser with authorization. The monitoring center can use CAST to transmit the actionable intelligence in real-time to first responders and other stakeholders for a true cooperative approach at threat assessment and alarm handling.
The product is very new, but Police Priority Founder and CEO Clayton Kemp explained that it is a product that will add value to both the dealers and the monitoring companies. Furthermore, he said the response from law enforcement has been overwhelmingly positive. “This is version 1.0,” Kemp said. “We have many police departments: Houston, Texas; Dallas; Charlotte, North Carolina; Detroit, Michigan; one in Vancouver; Orange County — we have a whole list of police departments we’ve already visited and vetted to make sure that before we went to market we understood that there would be true adoption within law enforcement agencies.
“Now Law enforcement agencies are calling,” he continued, “and asking us, ‘Hey where are the customers? We want to start using this.’ And so we’re in the mode now to do just that: bring them customers that will effectively use this tool to do two things: They can respond safer with more situational awareness, but it also helps them prioritize the alarm.”
Andy Leonard, retired major of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, said, “For many years law enforcement has responded to alarm events blindly. With the Police Priority CAST system the uncertainty of the event is eliminated and law enforcement now has the same intelligence that central monitoring centers have always had. This information will allow law enforcement agencies the ability to more effectively assign resources to an event and allow the officers to respond more safety. Police Priority has the ability to change the relationship between the alarm industry and law enforcement, allowing these two industries to become true partners in the prevention of crime and protection of life and property.”
Kemp said the product is designed to help dealers differentiate themselves in the marketplace. “By delivering true actionable intelligence to the police officers that are responding to the alarms, you’re doing just that: you’re bringing your best foot forward; you’re responsibly delivering a service in a solution to your customer that’s going to give them the best response that any security dealer can give.”
Part of what makes the product unique, Kemp explained, is that it delivers not just video clips of the threat, but also a GPS mapping location to that police officer at the same time, “and we’re doing this in real time so that as new events come in, the police officer knows the last known location of the person of interest there on site — whatever the monitoring center deems as a threat at that point, that is the information we’re pushing to the police officer, along with the map location.”
Kemp said that he supports PSAP and PPVAR and believes they will help the industry, but they are limited by standards adoption and the number of disparate computer-aided dispatch (CAD) systems.
“We have circumvented the need to use CAD systems because [CAST] is cloud based — it’s Internet browser [based], and 97 percent of all police departments have Internet access.
“So we’ve dumbed the whole UI down, including all the transcoding in the background so that it can support a 3G network; and most of your larger cities have 4G, and of course their police officers are armed with the latest technology, but even your more antiquated municipalities are still using 3G and some form of Internet access; the way we’ve developed it is it will still support those technologies, and then it also works on mobile phones — anything with an Internet browser and an Internet connection, you can gain access to the actionable intelligence.”
To see a demonstration of the technology at work, including video surveillance footage as police officers would see it from various cameras, please visit www.policepriority.com or call 888-651-1386.
