What can Europe do to make its cities safer?

Challenges connected with large urban environments, countering the terrorist use of explosive threats and minimum intrusion tools for de-escalation during mass gatherings – these are the three specific challenges, the Commission names in a working paper in order to make European cities resilient for future threats.

Urban security has been an issue since cities exist, this won’t change any time soon. Although the cities of the European Union count to the safest in the world, there are challenges that have to be tackled. Changing urban environments cause new threats and the European Union has to adapt in order to stay safe. In a working paper, the Commission names three specific areas, research should focus on, in order to become resilient to future security threats. These are: challenges connected with large urban environment, countering the terrorist use of an explosive threat and minimum intrusion tools for de-escalation during mass gatherings.

Big and safe

Especially large urban environments constitute an important challenge for security issues, as the Working Paper states:

European large urban environments are subject to various challenges and threats to urban security linked to their big size and large population. These challenges have also a strong impact on the security perception of the citizens and, by this, they can impact on the economic development and the quality of life.

In a call for the Research Framework Programme 7, Horizon 2020, the Commission names a growing need to go beyond the idea that only the law enforcement and criminal justice systems are tasked to tackle urban security challenges. New approaches and innovative solutions, including sustainable, affordable and transferrable security technologies, are needed to solicit citizens’ engagement to prevent, mitigate and recover from the above-mentioned security challenges. Fostering their direct participation in the improvement of the urban security conditions are encouraged.

Without citizen engagement and inclusion of all segments, security measures can’t be very effective. Thus, the call encourages actions to empower the citizens in smart cities by ensuring that the main urban dynamics are unveiled and available to the public, but also to appropriate sensing mechanisms, helping to make a city more transparent and readable. In order to do so, it is vital to extend knowledge on the topic:

A bottom-up approach is sought to ensure that solutions are satisfactorily responding to the needs of the end-users and of the citizens’ community at large. There is a need for an interdisciplinary approach involving contributions from technological research and socio-economic disciplines, particularly architecture, anthropology, arts, economy, law, linguistics and sociology.

Blowing up threats

Explosives are a big part of terrorism – an issue that the Union tackles as well. In recent years, extensive research has been undertaken in detecting and countering explosive threats concluding in innovative approaches to develop methods and technologies able to fill existing gaps or greatly improve already existing ones. These include

• Intelligence techniques to spot those preparing for an attack
• The inhibition of well-known precursors
• Detecting specific chemicals, and/or bomb factories and/or the Improvised Explosive Device (IED) in transit, and in particular in a flow of vehicles / people
• Neutralising the IED and undertaking forensic and evidential work

While a substantial amount of research and development has been carried out for purposes that could be applied to efforts to counter improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and home-made explosives (HMEs), up to now, no comprehensive research was undertaken to assess the effectiveness, the efficiency and the cost of all the developed methods/techniques (including those initially designed for a different purpose).

Detecting an explosive threat inside a flow of vehicles or passengers (including carried bags) also remains a major challenge at the present day.

The danger of crowds

Mass gatherings in cities have a potential risk of escalation. Therefore, they may pose a threat to the safety of individuals and the security of the society. Law enforcement as well as people in the crowd and in the neighbourhood are regularly injured, sometimes seriously. De-escalation concepts often lack the capabilities to defuse rising tensions with minimal intrusion techniques, a problem the call is aware of:

Research is needed to identify, test and assess new means of protecting citizens in crowd environments deteriorating into aggressive scenarios or even riots, such as sound, smell, communication, etc. These means should be administered locally and with high precision in places where crowd parameters are reaching critical values regarding the safety of citizens.

Crowd management tactics that are currently based on containment and controlled break-up by force could be replaced by festival tactics: One or more disrupting elements are removed with high precision and minimum intrusion before large scale escalation happens, but:

This can only be done if crowd management instruments are improved significantly with new sensors and processing capabilities. A strong societal dimension component should be at the core of the legal and ethical rules of operation as a prerequisite to ensure the acceptance of citizens of the instruments.

The results of research should lead to the elaboration of more effective and less intrusive police actions that significantly reduce the risk of escalation during mass gatherings and increase the level of urban security and its perception among the citizens.

Keywords

Security, urban safety, crowd security, explosives, terrorism, perception of security, minimum intrusion tools, de-escalation, mass gatherings, improving citizens’ protection