Incident alarms located at certain areas of the nation’s airports should be integrated with the surveillance camera systems at these airports to enable better situational awareness in the event of dangerous events such as the shooting last November at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) that resulted in the murder of a Transportation Security Officer (TSO), the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) says in a recent report.
TSA Administrator John Pistole said his agency is encouraging airports to link duress alarms and airport CCTV systems as a “best practice” to ensure that when an “alarm is received, a predetermined set of CCTV views would be programmed to automatically focus on the location of the alarm.” Testifying at a field hearing hosted by LAX and conducted by the House Homeland Security Transportation Security Subcommittee, Pistole also said that review conducted after the Nov. 1, 2013 shooting incident showed the need for more duress alarms at airport screening locations.
TSA has initiated a new acquisition effort to acquire alarms for integration at various locations within airports nationwide, Pistole said.
Los Angeles World Airports Authority (LAWA), which oversees LAX and two other nearby airports, says in its own report about the incident released on March 18 that CCTV systems are important contributors to threat detection and interdiction, adding that with technical enhancement they “can provide great value to management of large-scale incident command operations.”
The report also says that LAWA needs to assess the use “of security technologies and determine whether it is getting maximum value from the systems in which it has invested.” It cites the potential for “advanced video analytics and video target tracking and indexing technologies to maximize the value of installed CCTV systems.”
The CCTV systems and other sensor technologies are typically integrated at airport command centers through physical security information management (PSIM) software platforms. LAX employs NICE Systems’ Situator security management system as its PSIM solution.
The two reports also highlighted a lack of interoperable radio communications between various responding agencies within LAX. Despite communications difficulties, the alleged shooter was apprehended airport police just over four minutes after the first gunshots were fired.