By Mark F. Bonner
The Advocate
Copyright 2006 Capital City Press
All Rights Reserved
 
At any given moment a security alarm could mean a three-alarm blaze in a high-rise building, a hostage situation, a school shooting, or even a false alarm.

The only way to weed out the false alarms from the real ones is to show up, assess the situation and then call for the appropriate resources.

That takes time, and as Baton Rouge Fire Department Chief Ed Smith said Saturday morning at the unveiling of a new command system that could revolutionize the tactics of first response: "Seconds save lives in our world."

The new system is called Virtual Command Technology: a computer-based platform allowing law enforcement agencies and firefighters to pinpoint the location of a perpetrator or blaze using laptops while en route to an incident.

NetTalon of Fredericksburg, Va., put its technology to the test in front of a gathering of first responders Saturday morning as the Baton Rouge Police Special Response Team and the Fire Department conducted separate exercises inside the soon to be demolished A.Z. Young Building at 755 Third St.

Mock situations were placed before the police Special Response Team, also known as SRT, and the Fire Department. This is how they responded:

According to the drill's scenario, when a man breached the downtown A.Z. Young Building and set a fire somewhere in the 200,000-square-foot complex, officers did not have to go on a tedious door-to-door or floor-to-floor search.

Before they even arrived, responding officers tapped into their police cruiser laptops and pulled up a virtual floor plan of the building and identified the precise location of the suspect's movements using both wired and wireless monitoring stations inside the building.

As officers sped to the scene, they saw that the suspect was walking near the third floor stairwell. Using information from motion sensors already installed in the hallways, the team members headed for the intruder while pulling up data from a hallway video camera that provided an image of the suspect: revealing his clothing, race and physical characteristics.

The suspected arsonist had no idea he was being watched, that his movements were being recorded and that police were communicating among themselves to determine the safest way to end the incident.

Because officers were able to track his every move, the man was arrested without incident and without putting any officers into harm's way.

"If law enforcement in Pennsylvania had been able to use this technology, maybe that first shot would not have been fired, maybe it would have saved lives," Police Chief Jeff LeDuff said, referring to the incident in which a gunman killed five girls and wounded five others inside a one-room Amish schoolhouse.

"As a police chief who has lost two officers in two consecutive years, this technology is invaluable," LeDuff said.

After officers left the A.Z. Young Building, a second alarm signaled that the smoldering fire set by the arsonist had grown and engulfed a portion of the building.

While en route to the fire, the audience watched as the firefighters pulled the building floor plan up on a laptop and began tracking the spread of smoke and the exact location of the fire using digital temperature sensors.

Tapping into the building's pre-installed monitoring systems, the firefighters studied on their laptop real-time graphic information detailing the temperature and spread of the fire. Subsequently, the responding firefighters never were put into a life-threatening situation.

The police SRT and the Fire Department have been working with the technology for weeks and found the new system is superior to conventional tactics, officials said.

Each time SRT performed an exercise without Virtual Command Technology, it was never able to arrest the suspect. When SRT did use the technology, the team members always made the arrest in less than four minutes.

"I wish we could have this technology today," LeDuff said. "It would totally change the way we respond during emergency situations."

That may be a few years away. NetTalon Chief Executive Officer Daniel Colin said he knows his company will have to fight an uphill battle in order to get the technology on the street.

While the product is deployed in scattered portions of Virginia, Colin said that persuading the private sector to install NetTalon as opposed to traditional alarm systems has been tough.

At more than $3 a square foot, outfitting the 200,000-square foot A.Z. Young Building with virtual command technology would have cost $600,000.

"There is a 25 percent premium with our system," Colin said. "But we are working with the insurance companies to make it more affordable. It is a challenge, but we are also working with state legislators to make our system the minimum standard. It really isn't up to us."