Digital Sandbox Inc. (McClean, VA, USA), a provider of dynamic risk management solutions for homeland security, cooperated with the City of Tampa (FL, USA) Police Department to manage all risk elements for Super Bowl XLIII, which took place in February 2009. The company's Risk Analysis Center (RAC), a suite of software tools, analytics and information served as the core solution for this event. The Tampa police department coordinated the efforts of the many agencies involved in local law enforcement, fire and emergency management, as well as state and federal agencies.
"The key to managing security during a massive event is ensuring a collective understanding of the risks, and coordinating the scores of agencies involved in mitigating them," said Major John Bennett of the Tampa police department, incident commander for the Super Bowl. To meet this multi-agency challenge, his team relied on Digital Sandbox's RAC, which deploys a Common Operating Picture (COP) - a unified system for tracking and communicating risks and analyzing emerging threat situations.
"We installed our COP at command posts throughout the city, at the state level and in the federal government's Joint Operations Center. Officials at all levels had a common view of the situation," said Anthony F. Beverina, president and cofounder of Digital Sandbox. "By layering real-time intelligence and public safety message traffic over our critical infrastructure and risk data, we were able to provide... an unprecedented level of threat and risk awareness."
Leading up to the game, the Tampa region catalogued more than 4,300 critical infrastructure assets in the RAC, assessed 116 as most likely to be affected, and developed special in-depth profiles for 19 locations. This allowed the COP system, also integrating technology from partners ESRI (Redlands, CA, USA) and Swan Island Networks (Portland, OR, USA), to provide detailed views and incident tracking of over 30 separate events held at these venues.
In addition to the COP system, Digital Sandbox also provided commanders and stakeholders at the federal, state and local level as well as the mayor, the NFL and state agencies with 85 customized risk management "Playbooks" - detailed descriptions of potential threats and advanced security response scenarios. "Deploying this knowledge in Playbooks allowed us to put actionable information in the hands of the key decision makers," Major Bennett said.
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Digital Sandbox
ESRI
Swan Island Networks
