Enhancing school security with video analytics

In the last few decades, new challenges have emerged for schools. From evolving cybersecurity risks and violent crimes to concerns about harassment and bullying, it’s become challenging to monitor all corners of educational facilities and keep students and staff safe.

Learn how combining video analytics and a collaborative decision management system helps schools take a more proactive approach to risk detection. As well as how technological investments can help decision-makers understand the data they’re collecting to enhance the education experience at their institution.

 

 

Current top security challenges for schools

Keeping schools safe has become more difficult over the years. On top of that, resources and budgets are already stretched. Even if additional cameras are deployed across a school campus, staff don’t always have the time to manually search through video footage to find out what happened following an incident. Watching hours of video, or scrubbing archives isn’t always possible, especially when other important situations take precedence.

For example, on-campus conflicts such as fights or suspicious activity after school hours are often high-priority incidents that require immediate attention. These situations can lead to serious physical harm or emotional distress. They also affect the learning environment, diminishing the academic performance and mental health of other students.

Even incidents involving vandalism, trespassing, and loitering can be damaging to schools. Perpetrators will often try to tamper with cameras to conceal their acts. And when cameras are damaged, they can create blind spots which impact overall school security.

Monitoring private spaces such as restrooms can also be tricky. Using cameras in those spaces is obviously off-limits, but students can take advantage of that to engage in bad behavior. School security and staff need to know about situations involving possible substance abuse, smoking, fighting, bullying, or other risks.

How can schools adequately monitor all vulnerable areas on their property, deter bad behavior, and ensure staff and students remain safe? The answer is more complex than suggesting one single security product, but using video analytics can help.

Benefits of video analytics in education

Video analytics can give school security teams and staff a huge efficiency boost. While operators are busy handling other tasks, video analytics work in the background to detect potential fights, thefts, loitering, and much more. This helps your team know when something is underway that needs their attention. From there, they can take immediate action to address risks before they become bigger problems.

Below are a few key examples of how video analytics can support school security teams:

Speed up video searches and investigations

Using forensic search analytics, your security operators can search through video footage in less time. They can also receive notifications as soon as any suspicious activity is detected. With real-time search and review functions, they’ll be able to immediately identify incidents involving violence or vandalism and retrieve valuable evidence for investigations. They can also filter searches based on object, class, or directional movement to easily locate specific events or individuals, even in crowded locations.

Increase awareness about student behavior

When you have a good understanding of how people are moving through your school or campus, your team can make more informed decisions. For instance, using people counting video analytics, you’ll know the exact number of students entering or leaving your buildings throughout the day. This helps staff gauge attendance rates and know exactly how many people are in your building at any given moment.

You can also use crowd estimation analytics to detect when students are gathering in the hallway. After being alerted to the situation, you may notice a fight breaking out and dispatch security officers and other staff to address the problem.

Crowd estimation analytics can notify your team when a maximum threshold of people has entered an area or building. This can help your school alleviate any congestion to improve the student experience, and also ensure you comply with any fire and safety requirements for health mandates.

Enhance serious threat or intrusion detection

Video analytics allow your school to identify situations and behaviors that could pose serious risks. Using object detection analytics, your team can be alerted to dangerous items such as weapons or strange items left behind. Integrating gun detection technologies—using visual, audio detection, or both—can be a critical enhancement to your school's safety and policies.

Perimeter protection technology can also help you prevent unauthorized entry or trespassing. As soon as someone crosses a fence line or enters a specific zone at certain times of the day, your team will know about it. They can then intervene and make sure the property is secured.

Minimize camera damage and tampering

Surveillance cameras are vulnerable to damage and tampering. If a device falls offline or gets covered without someone noticing, you might not be able to retrieve footage for an important investigation.

Using camera integrity monitoring analytics helps you keep your devices running at peak efficiency. The system will automatically track and alert you to camera events such as tampering, decreased video quality, or abrupt directional change.

You can then investigate alarms or retrieve reports of these events to know when there are bigger issues at play, or if devices need replacing. All of this helps you maintain a safe and secure environment, deter destructive behavior, and stay on top of any recurring device failures that need addressing.

Monitor sensitive areas around the school

Having cameras outside of sensitive areas such as restrooms or locker rooms can help identify emergency situations. For example, if a student is injured or ill in the restroom, operators can search video to identify their location should they need critical assistance.

Some schools have found that implementing sound detection in restrooms can help too. For example, sound detection devices or analytics can identify certain keywords such as ‘help’ and immediately notify operators. They could then review footage from nearby cameras for additional information and dispatch security personnel to check on the situation.

If ever there’s a schoolwide emergency, security staff can ensure people in sensitive areas receive important public announcements. Through a SIP-based intercom integration with your video surveillance system, automated announcements can get sent from the devices set up with your cameras across an entire facility.

 

 

Track vehicles on school property

Installing automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) cameras at the entrances and exits of schools can help bolster security. School principals can create custom lists using vehicle license plates of people that are not permitted on or near school property.

They can also integrate registered databases from law enforcement agencies. When the system detects a vehicle with a license plate from those lists, security staff will be alerted to intervene before the individuals reach the building.

Keep students safe without sacrificing privacy

Video footage can be pixelated using Privacy Protector analytics. This allows security staff to monitor live or recorded video with anything that isn’t the static background. This helps protect the identities of individuals and strengthens compliance with evolving privacy laws.

How do video analytics and a decision management system create safer schools?

Having various video analytics can be extremely helpful to your school staff. But managing all the incoming notifications could also overwhelm your team too. When they are already so busy handling other jobs, the last thing they need is more stress from video analytics noise.

What’s the solution? Investing in a decision management system alongside video analytics solutions. This technology duo helps your teams filter through all false alarms and focus on the most urgent events.

Genetec Mission Control™ is a collaborative decision management system that gives operators new levels of situational intelligence, visualization, and complete incident management capabilities. It does this by automatically analyzing all the data and alarms across your security and operational systems, and then pointing your operators to the most pressing situations.

With a decision management system, your team will feel more confident and in control of any situation. Here’s how:

1. Receive automatic alerts about suspicious activity on campus and get step-by-step guidance on which actions to take to ensure the fastest and most compliant response.
2. Trigger geo-located incidents from a mobile application to alert the security team immediately and pinpoint where a fight or missing student was identified.
3. Get notifications about crowds and capacity limits in various areas around the school and either dispatch additional resources to address issues or restrict access to avoid overcrowding.

What are the limitations of video analytics?

Although using video analytics offers valuable insights and great benefits for schools, there are a few limitations that should be considered:

1. Maintaining privacy: Deploying video analytics with privacy in mind can help reduce privacy concerns in schools. This involves implementing video analytics with full transparency along with having well-defined business objectives and policies around how data is collected, stored, and used. Both parents and students should be fully informed about the purpose of having video analytics and all the data policies surrounding them.
2. Limited monitoring: Having cameras in every corner of a school is costly and unrealistic. This makes it difficult to monitor every single area in a school. Some cameras may also have a limited field of view due to how the camera is positioned. Poor lighting conditions in some areas may also impact how analytics function as the software may not be able to detect certain objects or events. The correct lighting and placement of cameras are critical to capture the entire scene and avoid missing events.

Enhance your school safety and response procedures with analytics

Video analytics coupled with a decision support system gives your team broader awareness of what’s happening in your facilities, and the tools to quickly mitigate risks that can impact your students and staff.

More than that, it helps maintain privacy and give you a better understanding of how people use your facilities. This means you can ensure everything is flowing smoothly throughout the school day and your educational institution remains secured.