The private security industry provides protection services for people, premises and property across many different sectors. Services vary widely but include guarding cash and valuables in transit (CVIT), close protection of individuals, door supervision, public space surveillance and overseeing video surveillance systems. It also includes crowd management/stewarding at events, guarding occupied buildings, vacant property protection, overseeing access and asset protection.
But whatever the role, some form of personal communication device is a must for most private security personnel. Sean Fitzgerald, EMEA customer insights marketing manager at Motorola Solutions UK, says: “Most security guards are connected to their wider security team, and two-way radio has been around for a long time to fulfil that need.
“Obviously some of the functionality that has been built into radios over time like lone-worker, man-down and emergency calling functionality play very well in the private security market. We do still see that people are relying on radios because of the mission-critical nature of the use-case.”
The choice of technology will largely depend on just how mission critical the security guard’s job is. Fitzgerald says that while two-way radios are still very much the work horse in the security market, Motorola is seeing some adoption of Push-to-talk over Cellular (PoC) technology. “But not really as a replacement, more as an enhancement of, or an extension to, traditional LMR systems.”
Leo Kokaj, product manager at Hytera Communications UK, is more bullish about the prospects of security industry PoC. “There is definitely a move towards PoC, although we are
still in a transition period,” he concedes. “We are trying to plug that gap between traditional radio and all the added functionality you get with smart mobile phones.
“We need to combine all the requirements that a security guard still uses with traditional radios, like the PTT button and emergency button, along with the military standard ruggedness and a high IP rating. We also need to provide all the functionality that you get with a commercial Android smartphone, including video and data.”
According to the company, Hytera’s range of PoC, dual-mode DMR/LTE devices and body-worn video (BWV) are designed to bridge that gap. Kokaj believes that PoC can provide companies with a “microcosm of the bigger two-way radio security systems that are out there, but in a smaller, easier to manage PoC system”.
One company that is embracing PoC is ShopSafe, which provides radio comms to help business improvement districts, community revitalisation partnerships, councils, shopping centres, parks, retailers and hospitality implement crime prevention schemes.
Elliot Blenkhorn, sales director at ShopSafe, explains: “We are now moving the comms for all of our ShopWatch offering and panic systems to a PoC-based system, predominantly running on the Hytera HyTalk PoC platform modified by ourselves. Then we have our own dispatchers and apps which we customise to integrate with that as well.”
One of the attractions of PoC from ShopSafe’s perspective is that it is able to host all the servers itself, so its in-house software developers can easily extract in-depth analytics from the PoC devices and share the findings with its customers. He reports that while PoC is popular with those who have adopted it, there is still “definitely some scepticism” around PoC. “I don’t think the uptake of PoC is widespread yet.”
Unsurprisingly, everyone agrees that instant PTT voice is still the killer app for private security guards, followed by location and tracking services. “GPS and tracking is useful to see where a person is or was during a perimeter check,” observes Kokaj.
There may be patrol points that the guard has to scan using his device, which we can provide with NFC compatibility.
“The dispatch system can see exactly where the person is at the time of the call,” adds Kokaj, “and it enables geofences to be set up. If you want a security guard to stay in a specific place, the dispatcher can draw a geofence around a particular area and receive a notification any time someone enters or leaves that area.”
Blenkhorn reports that ShopSafe is working with a couple of clients in shopping centres to develop indoor positioning systems based on iBeacons to work with the PoC devices, as they are cheap, fast and easy to deploy. “It will integrate back into the dispatch software and allow you to accurately monitor where people are indoors,” he says.
In addition to the emergency calling button, man-down and lone-worker alerts are also widely deployed by security firms. Fitzgerald says: “If you have a security guard driving down an industrial estate on his own, lone worker can certainly help meet the employer’s liability in terms of providing protection for lone workers.”
Among the more sophisticated apps are those that automatically switch the camera on if a trigger such as the emergency button is pushed. Blenkhorn says: “Two or three years ago, we would have just been talking radio, but now we are talking integrated body cameras and radios where you can stream back video and provide a lot more data to the control room.
We link it to the panic button, so if the guard has a camera phone or BWV, it will send an alarm into the control room and share both the audio and video camera footage.”
In terms of other apps, Fitzgerald cites the obvious usefulness of being able to send mugshots of known criminals or missing persons. “You can send a photo of a missing child out to security guards at all the exit points of the shopping centre, for example.”
For security firms, the ability to link IoT sensors and alarms like smoke detectors to radios is very helpful. This is possible with DMR systems, but as Blenkhorn notes, this does require a physical gateway to be wired up to the fire panel, so an alert can be sent to the security guard’s radio. Linking IoT sensors to PoC systems is much easier and faster as they can be integrated at a software level and connected back to LTE networks.
There has been a big take-up of BWV by private security firms for reasons that are not hard to identify. “BWV records an incident so you have incontrovertible evidence of
what happened, evidence that cannot be challenged, which is very useful,” offers Fitzgerald.
Kokaj says: “BWV can also provide a real deterrent to aggressive behaviour, as if people realise they are being recorded they tend to behave themselves, because they know [the footage] can be used against them.” BWV can therefore help protect guards, while Blenkhorn adds that video recordings can also help refute false accusations from the public.
Fitzgerald notes that BWV is typically used in standalone mode with recordings uploaded at the end of the shift to the evidence management system back at the office. But with the right BWV or camera radio it is, of course, possible to stream video live back to a control room for greater situational awareness.
Some Motorola cameras can talk to each other, so when a security guard gets within Bluetooth range of a colleague’s BWV, it will automatically switch his camera on too as he approaches. “You get multiple fields of view as the incident unfolds. It’s called peer-assisted recording,” says Fitzgerald.
This kind of automated functionality is an indicator of how comms technology is evolving in the security space. “It’s about trying to automate some of the functionality, so the security guard can focus on what is happening and not have to worry about turning the camera on,” explains Fitzgerald.
Video analytics coupled with AI software to enable rapid searches and detect abnormal behaviours have been available for some time, but are now becoming more common. Live facial recognition is clearly one application that is very useful for police and security guards, although it remains controversial.
“But there is also retrospective AI,” says Blenkhorn. “The ability to look back through your video evidence and start to organise that. Not only can we identify faces and integrate them back into our crime sharing Alert! app, but we can also search through the video footage for a person in a red shirt, or a red car at midday in this location.”
Video analytics, AI and machine learning can take the heavy lifting out of having to wade through hours of video footage or spotting something on multiple live cameras. Additional software, such as Motorola’s Orchestrate, is designed to automate some tasks and workflows, like sending automatic text messages, to free up security dispatchers to concentrate on more important tasks.
For Kokaj, the future is about how manufacturers can make the radio device a more effective help to the security guard. “It is about providing something that can be intelligent, not just seeing or hearing what is going on, but listening and analysing too. We are embarking on apps like predictive messaging, predictive video and predictive warnings in some devices.”
He explains that AI and machine learning can be used to mine big data sets collected from specific types of past incidents. The analysis can establish patterns of behaviour that allows the software to predict if some kind of incident is likely to happen and then possibly pre-empt it.
Many private security roles will not require this level of sophisticated support. However, in an increasingly complex world with new kinds of threats occurring all the time, security guards are being required to do more with less, so these more futuristic technology developments may well enter the mainstream before too long.
