You may not always be aware of this, but there are multiple threats to your safety in society. Therefore, public safety is a top concern for all countries interested in protecting their citizens. Public safety simply involves protecting the masses from dangers like crimes and natural disasters. It is the government's responsibility to ensure public safety. That's why UK Home Secretary Priti Patel announced late last year that policing will receive a funding boost of around £1.1 billion in 2022 to lower crime and make streets safer. No one can overlook technology's key role in enhancing modern-day public safety operations. That said, here are 4 top public safety tech trends to watch out for in 2022.
By Team Savant
Image: Jason Blackeye
1. 5G For Advanced Communications Networks
You have undoubtedly heard about 5G, the next generation of cellular technology. 5G will not only help you stream and download files faster but will be a key technology that improves our public safety and emergency services. Voice communications are still vital in public safety and emergency services. However, advanced data and video applications are gradually taking over. Police body cameras, for instance, are presently being leveraged to record and share incident pictures straight to command-and-control centres. The communications network used by these technologies needs to be fast, secure, and resilient, considering the public's safety relies heavily on it.
Enter 5G— a significant improvement on the capabilities of 4G. As 5G rolls out countywide, public safety teams will be able to take advantage of better network stability, higher bandwidth, and lower latency. It will allow for near-instant data and video streaming with better quality. This will allow first responders, specifically emergency centres, to receive social media broadcasts, live streaming videos from large events, etc. Several Brits agree that if first responders had access to more location, medical information, and video or audio data, they could save more lives. 5G networks will enable this data's efficient and effective transmission during emergencies when time is extra precious.
2. Drones Will Deliver the Groundbreaking Situational Awareness
In November 2020, a survey found that 40 out of the 42 national police forces had adopted drone technology. Many experts think that the development and use of drones in the public safety domain will only keep growing this year. This is good news because law enforcement agencies and other stakeholders will work more efficiently. For instance, your local police will be able to quickly patrol large areas and deliver real-time reports for informed decision-making. This way, police and emergency service resources can be deployed to high-value tasks.
The police are already using drones to find missing people, reconstruct accidents, gather evidence, respond to disasters, and control crowds at major events. Firefighters are also using drones with thermal imaging cameras to operate more efficiently. Fortunately, the future of drones in public safety is quite bright. Rapid technology development combined with sensors, GPS, and AI usage means that drones will increasingly operate autonomously. So you can expect to see a lot of drones being used in difficult-to-reach locations with limited human involvement this year. However, the UK government has put several laws to regulate drone use. These laws signify the increasing acceptance of drones' contribution to a safer society. For instance, public safety officials using drones from www.drdrone.ca and other reputable manufacturers cannot fly within any airspace restriction without prior permission.
3. Public Safety Organisation's Increasing Cloud Adoption
You have been living under a rock if you haven't heard about the cloud recently. The cloud is simply software and services that run on the internet instead of your computer or device. As such, it allows you to access stored data over the web. Modern public safety organisations have recognised the numerous benefits of cloud adoption. So, we can expect more and more of them to migrate their operations to the cloud. Many public safety organisations like the police still have huge investments in servers, storage, networking, and professionals supporting these systems. However, the cloud offers law enforcement agencies a far better deal: quick scalability with predictable expenses. Leading cloud service platforms also enable data sharing with authorised identities. The police force can also preserve all their metadata in the cloud, simplifying searching for evidence on a particular case or individual.
The police force isn't the only public safety organisation to recognise the immense benefits of cloud adoption. In 2021, West Midlands Fire Service, the UK's second-largest fire and rescue service, appointed Namos Solutions to spearhead a digital transformation initiative to move its HR and finance operations to Oracle Cloud. This adoption makes the West Midlands Fire Service the first fire service in the nation to move to the Oracle Cloud platform. And it is expected that many other fire services will follow suit.
4. Increasing Focus On Cybersecurity
There can be no discussion of public safety technology trends without cybersecurity. Natively, government departments have access to volumes of incredibly valuable information. Therefore, it has become essential to guard public safety organisations' networks from bad actors seeking to steal sensitive and valuable data. The fight against cybercrime is not easy due to the frequency and complexity of attacks against government agencies. For instance, VPNoverview revealed that UK police forces suffered 2,386 data breaches in 2020. If you live in Lancashire, you may be surprised to learn that your Constabulary alone recorded 594 incidents.
All hope is not lost in the war against cybercrime, though. In 2022, all public safety agencies motivated to avoid hacks' stress, chaos, and embarrassment will seek more secure and proven technologies from private and private sources. Also, zero trust networks will likely become more popular among public safety organisations. Zero trust assumes that no device on a network is trustworthy, so each access request is verified based on a defined access policy. 2022 is when many public safety organisations will proactively tackle vulnerabilities to their mission-critical systems. The challenge for each agency now is to locate trustworthy vendors and acquire the best security-aware technologies that will protect their operations.