Smart City Community Safety
Community safety and well-being is one of the top pillars when it comes to the architecture of any city - not just smart ones. Over the last few decades, more and more cities around the globe have focused on enhancing security and safety for their residents, be it at an urban level, or from a data point of view.
The needs of a city constantly evolve and change, and this was one of the main takeaways following the impact of COVID-19. Leaders have put citizen safety at the very top of their priority lists, and this is easily seen throughout new strategies and planning that put this in focus.
Over the next few months, city governments will build their 2021–2022 strategies, based on which community challenges will be most urgent to address in a post-pandemic world - one of these being community safety.
In addition to the effects of Covid, 2020 was an unprecedentedly hard year in many other areas as well - from floods, hurricanes and forest fires, to civil unrest continuing to grow in significant parts of the world.
Smart city lighting, as a starting point, is a big step for many cities. It is one key initiative that improves citizen safety, while saving up electricity bills which means that funding can go into a number of other projects.
Another useful strategy lies in sensors that can help detect public safety issues, especially when it comes to natural disasters. By using sensors in tandem with predictive analytics, city governments can detect issues and drive outcomes during and after natural disasters.
We are also now looking at more high-tech solutions that look into a community’s crime rate, and how data is playing an increasingly important role in crime prevention as agencies try to preempt crime by tapping into all streams of data, including social and crowd-sourced information. In this matter, there are already a few security trends that we can expect to see being deployed in smart cities strategies: augmented security screening, crowdsourcing and emergency apps, data-based crime prevention, drones for risk assessment or smart cybersecurity.
Community safety strategies will continue to unfold and upgrade in accordance to a city’s needs and challenges and this focus provides a new base for a more stable foundation - while we must also, needless to say, pay attention to how we process and manage data safely and ethically.
