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MillimeterLondon Bombings Renew Interest In High-End Security
Aug 25, 2005 8:00 AM
The recent terrorist bombing incidents in London—during which citizens disseminated numerous photos and videos shot from their cell phones—have helped launch a third wave of interest in surveillance and security applications in the United States.
This resurgence is challenging America’s AV integrators to learn more about different businesses in order to offer clients more comprehensive solutions.
Chuck Wilson, executive director of the National Systems Contractors Association, sees three clear upswings in security interests in recent years.
“Columbine started it,” Wilson says, referring to the Columbine High School shootings in April 1999. “We saw a big wave of new security in the schools. Then after 9/11 we saw a corporate wave, with tons of security stuff being done.” Now, he adds, the London incidents have re-ignited interest in security.
“Even some of our member companies who haven’t traditionally done security are now being asked about it,” he reports.
However, Tom Corzine, director of federal sales at Audio Visual Innovations, says this presents a special challenge: Just saying you can do security doesn’t mean you can.
“Generally, security firms do not have access to our technology, and integrators typically do not have security expertise,” Corzine says.
Creating a really effective security systems requires expertise that goes beyond installing digital video cameras and a control room to monitor them, Corzine says. Even the best video surveillance system is only showing users what’s happening elsewhere, not controlling or preventing events.
AV integrators who claim security expertise "may be doing their customers a disservice," Corzine says. “On the other hand, the people who do know security often don’t know AV.”
Corzine sees this as a golden opportunity for AV integrators to partner with security experts and deliver complete solutions to their customers.
Wilson says the whole AV and electronics industry is rapidly improving its ability to address these issues by developing new best practices and guidelines that help designers with everything from building siting and landscaping to asset tracking using radio frequency ID tags.
Security-minded clients, Wilson says, are becoming increasingly interested in the high-quality images and easy data handling facilitated by digital video.
“It used to be all the images were black-and-white, NTSC video on cassettes,” Wilson says. It was cumbersome to scan through all of this video, looking for specific footage, and often inefficient to keep large archives handy, but with digital video-capture techniques and storage, these roadblocks are melting away. Once video capture techniques achieved their major enhancements, the focus has moved to displays.
“Using DVRs, the high-resolution screens can now provide incredibly high-resolution images." Wilson says. "AV technology that was once used for corporate installs has started to cross over and be used for surveillance thanks to this interest in higher quality.”
One of the big appeals of digital video systems is that they dovetail with a broad interest in automating security, Corzine says. “Security in the past was a very manual operation. Now, there’s a rapid move to automate nearly every aspect of security.
This trend is going hand in hand with a change in social attitudes, Wilson says. “The balance in our society has always been more weighted toward privacy and civil liberties. Now we’re seeing a definite shift, and a sense that we can have a balance of these concerns and security.”
Continue the discussion on Crosstalk the Millimeter Forum.