Simplifying First Response, When Seconds Count
During your lunch break at work, the server cautiously places the soft drinks on the table, she returns with the “young customer crayon kit”, a small box of colored crayons and a creative coloring-in page. Lisa, your 7 year old little girl, visiting you at work for the day, is sitting just across from you, her smile lighting the entire outdoor seating area, the spring sunlight glistening off her large, innocent eyes. Just then, a man leaps over the railing and grabs her, he makes a desperate run with her to the awaiting vehicle and they speed off. You revert to what you were taught as a young girl at school and in a modern interpretation, immediately take a photo of the white car speeding away with Lisa, with your Lisa. You dial the local police emergency number and are told a unit will respond as soon as possible but you know if Lisa is not found within minutes, she probably never will be.
With the local police average response time at 22 minutes, you drop to your knees and scream a silent scream as you know you are alone
It doesn’t have to be that way, and in this blog post, there is an attainable, alternate ending that goes like this: with the photo of the escape vehicle, you open the GlobeKeeper app, you immediately create an incident and send the photo out to your “community”. In addition to the community, your corporate GSOC receives the alert of an employee in distress and opens the dashboard. They see the incident description, your location and the media you’ve uploaded. They plug the closest camera into the GlobeKeeper dashboard and start a live stream.
In less than a minute, reports of sightings of the vehicle are coming in, first as a trickle and then pouring in. The corporate GSOC is now receiving crowd sourced data from the “community” of users, from multiple IoT devices, and whilst processing the data, opens a parallel communications channel with the police call center, feeding them real time actionable intelligence as it comes in.
13 Minutes have passed since the abduction and your stress levels peak when a message from the GSOC appears on the secure GlobeKeeper channel on your phone; it reads:
“Through your quick thinking supported by crowd sourced information, and live feeds from our IoT devices, local Law Enforcement have rescued Lisa and she’s shaken up, but completely unharmed. They’re on their way to your location with her now”.
Incidents that are mismanaged or not managed quickly transform into crisis, which ending would you prefer? A quick, decisive and positive ending to an incident or an out of control crisis?
GlobeKeeper customers have clearly made the decision that a positive ending is much preferred over a crisis. Some of our corporate customers are using GlobKeeper for travel security on a global scale and locally for active Shooter response and other onsite campus emergencies; some government agencies are using GlobeKeeper for Dignitary Protection during both routine and emergency, but what’s really interesting is how one community is using GlobeKeeper technology to make a significant and daily impact to community members.
The Hout Bay Community Crime Prevention Center in Hout Bay, South Africa, utilizes GlobeKeeper’s technology, branded as Buzzer. Keri Cross and her team have significantly increased efficiency of response to incidents as well as significantly reduced the overall crime in their area of operations. By using Buzzer, Keri connects residents, control rooms, and responders to securely communicate on one uniform platform, cutting out “white noise” created when using multiple channels and maximizing a built for purpose incident management platform.
A real-world example is that of Janet (alias). Janet observed a violent mugging in Green Point, Cape Town; at 18:09, she created an emergency request for assistance event in Buzzer and almost immediately, 31 responders, including multiple control rooms had joined the virtual command and control room. At 18:12, just 3 minutes later, the response team was onsite and within 4 minutes from the initial cry for help, the muggers were apprehended by licensed, private security and handed over to the local police.
Buzzer has helped reduce crime by as much as 70% in some areas and has helped replace “traditional” instant messaging platforms.
The Hout Bay community service, via Buzzer, helped transform the initial 2000 users on 70<chat groups to over 6000 users on one, easy to use, scalable, secure, light, powerful and comprehensive system.
