Making the Safe City
Safety and security are rising concerns for municipalities and districts all around the world. GuardTools was built for public safety from scratch and supports all key roles in the process.
Expectations
Governments, the media and the general public are expecting local governments to work more with crime prevention and perceived feelings of safety. As you know, perceived feelings of safety is not the same as actual safety. For example, crimes could be increasing will the perceived feelings of safety is increasing. This is why reliable data is crucial to suggest solutions that will have a desired effect.
Risk Management
All risk management starts with knowing what the problems are, when they occur, and where. With this awareness, and only then, it is possible to decide what is the best way forward. Without it, it is close to impossible to untangle these complex issues.
“Creating safe and secure urban space is a task filled with dilemmas that requires many conflict-ridden considerations, interdisciplinary work, and a careful balance between social, physical, and organisational interventions.”
from Safe Urban Spaces by Nordic Safe Cities, 2021
Working Towards a Safer Society
Many municipalities and districts hire private security or employ their own staff to prevent crime and to help people to feel safe. Civil initiatives with volunteer work is also common. Operations like these usually concern areas that are perceived as unsafe or have a history of incidents. They serve at least three purposes.
- Being proactive by being seen and to prevent incidents before they occur.
- Reacting to incidents by interfering, calling the police and documenting.
- Learning and understanding about why, where, when and how incidents occur.
When you understand the causes, you can act even more proactively and adjust your security resources accordingly. Of course, this assumes that there is reliable information to begin with.
Reliable Statistics is Key
It is challenging to capture the complexities of the world as statistical information. But the report function in GuardTools has been finetuned and refined over the years to be as fast as possible to use, while still producing reliable statistical data.
Our Events and Actions Library makes sure that the information from the field becomes valid and reliable statistics. For example: all vandalism should of course be reported, and it needs to be reported in exactly the same way to produce reliable statistics.
With accurate statistics, chief security officers and other managers can make long-term analyses, make well-informed and strategic decisions, and adjust their investments to work with goals about reducing crime, cutting costs, improving safety, attracting tourists and new inhabitants, and strengthening the brand of the place in general.
Did you know?
Copenhagen is #1 in the Safe Cities Index
Stockholm is #10
The GuardTools System
GuardTools currently consists of five core applications. They can be combined according to your needs and integrated with other software systems.
GuardTools Mobile
Mobile app to report from the field
GuardTools Web
Web portal for statistics
GuardTools Command & Control
Alarms and workforce management
GuardTools Static Guarding
Specialized for protecting static sites
GuardTools Office
Administrative and data organization
GuardTools Mobile is the perfect tool for field workers, guards, volunteers and others who report from the field. It is quick and efficient, and all events and actions are stored securely in the cloud and visualized as statistics in GuardTools Web. This is an ideal tool to meet the requirements for documentation and accountability, and to answer questions from the police, insurance companies and others.
GuardTools Office works as the backbone of the system. This is where you add and manage data and information. GuardTools Command & Control connects the field workers with an alarm operator for an unparalleled real-time situational awareness. Finally, GuardTools Static Guarding is designed specifically for protecting static sites.
Built on Science
GuardTools grew out of a public safety project at the research institute RISE in Gothenburg, Sweden. Our founder Peter Andreasson studied how to support the whole chain of security guarding: all the way from the field, through the office and to the end client. His studies were financed by the city of Gothenburg and the insurance company Göta Lejon.
From the city’s point of view, they were doing too much reactive work. They wanted to raise their security awareness to work more proactively. The reports from the hired guarding companies only
contained the most serious incidents and left out large amounts of events and actions. Three key results were:
- Guards report only 1 in 15 events or actions, due to cumbersome tools.
- Reports in running text were imprecise, difficult to understand and unusuable for statistics not least because two guards would use different words to describe the same thing.
- The biggest value for the end client is the report, since it informs decisions and investments.
GuardTools was developed to approach these issues as efficiently as possible from the start. This is why we developed the Events and Actions library.
User friendly interfaces
Custom and automatic reports to each stakeholder(s)
Personalized web-portal with stats and powerful search
Advanced permissions system
Integrations with other software systems
Accountability with detailed documentation
Contact
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