Emergency Vehicle Priority Based System

Every country's vehicular traffic is increasing, growing, and there is terrible traffic congestion at intersections. In the current case, most traffic lights have a fixed light sequence, so green light sequence is to determine with-out taking priority vehicles into account. As a result, priority crews such as police cars, ambulances, fire engines are still unable to perform, get stuck in traffic and come in late, which can result in the loss of valuable property and life, which does happen on occasion. The green light sequence is evaluated given the current state of traffic, without taking into account the existence of emergency vehicles. Our aim to this paper is to present a mechanism for scheduling emergency vehicles. It is provided to important such as access control protocol to convey emergency vehicle information to the Traffic Management Center (TMC) with time delay and to all alerts while using GPS techniques for acquiring emergency vehicle information. Only then is the emergency vehicle quickly dispatched, and the destination is reached on time. It would be helpful in the future for the prominence of casual vehicles.

Influence of Wearing Ballistic Vests on Physical Performance of Danish Police Officers: A Cross-Over Study

Purpose: We aimed to investigate the influence of wearing a ballistic vest on physical performance in police officers. Methods: We performed a cross-over study to investigate the influence of wearing a ballistic vest on reaction and response time, lumbar muscle endurance and police vehicle entry and exit times. Reaction and response time was based on a perturbation setup where the officers’ pelvises were fixed and EMG of lumbar and abdominal muscles was recorded. We used a modified Biering–Sørensen test to assess the lumbar muscle endurance and measured duration of entry and exit maneuvers in a variety of standard-issue police cars. Results: There was a significant difference of 24% in the lumbar muscle endurance test (no vest: 151 s vs. vest: 117 s), and the police officers experienced higher physical fatigue after the test when wearing a vest. Furthermore, officers took longer to both enter and exit police cars when wearing a vest (range: 0.24–0.56 s) depending on the model of the vehicle. There were no significant differences in reaction and response times between the test conditions (with/without vest). Discussion and Conclusion: Wearing of a ballistic vest significantly influenced the speed of movement in entry and exit of police cars and lumbar muscle endurance, although it does not seem to affect reaction or response times. The ballistic vest seems to impair performance of tasks that require maximal effort, which calls for better designs of such vests.

To the edge and beyond: How fast-response organizations adapt in rapidly changing crisis situations

Fast-response organizations excel in mounting swift and coordinated responses to unexpected events. There are a multitude of conflicting explanations why these organizations excel. These range from acknowledging the strengths of centralized command and control structures, towards stressing the importance of decentralized, improvised action. Though this dichotomy is derived from studies offering either structure or action-based explanations, we were able to reconcile these insights by looking into the process of how fast-responders organize themselves during an unfolding crisis. We analyzed 15 high-speed police pursuits crossing multiple administrative units and jurisdictions, and interviewed and observed officers at work in multiple operations centers, police cars, and helicopters. Our analysis uncovered that fast-responders regularly transition between designed, frontline, and partitioned modes of organizing, each characterized by practices that shape command, allocation, and information sharing. Success and failure are rooted in the ability of the responders to adapt their mode of organizing by tacking back and forth between these practices. Based on our findings, we constructed a process model that provides a deeper understanding of fast-response organizing that informs future studies on organizing in extreme contexts.

Bushra El-Turk and Eleanor Knight, Silk Moth Grimeborn, 9 August 2019

When Eleanor Knight began researching her libretto for Silk Moth, she had to decide how to frame an opera about honour violence. Meeting women whose lives it had ruptured through the Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation, she confronted the usual images that accompany the dozen-or-so honour killings per year in the UK media. Between the ‘old, faded school photos’ that illustrate victimhood and the male perpetrators with ‘blankets over their heads … shoved into waiting police cars’, she saw a gulf of painful complexity. ‘What’, she asks, ‘of the mothers?’.

SafeFollowing: A collaborative model for public security agents to assist people with disabilities and the elderly

In the last survey about the Brazilian population conducted by IBGE, more than 45.6 million of Brazilians declared that they have some kind of disability. Besides that, the same survey revealed that the number of elderly people has been increasing over the years and at that time it already represented 12.1 \% of the total. In this scenario, public policies that can efficiently ensure the rights of this share of the population became even more necessary. In the same manner, with the popularization of mobile devices, opportunities to develop new solutions are arising, offering more independence and quality of life to them. Ubiquitous accessibility support solutions have been proposed, such as the MASC model, which resorts to the concept of smart assistive city; and more recently the AccompCare, which predicts the monitoring of people with disabilities and the elderly. This article proposes the SafeFollowing, a model that enables integrated and collaborative acting of the community aiming to assist people with some kind of disability or elderly people. The SafeFollowing predicts the use of police cars mapping, in order to provide a specific follow-up in adverse daily situations. The validation of the model is also presented in the article, which was performed through experiments in real test scenarios.

Discovering place-informative scenes and objects using social media photos

Understanding the visual discrepancy and heterogeneity of different places is of great interest to architectural design, urban design and tourism planning. However, previous studies have been limited by the lack of adequate data and efficient methods to quantify the visual aspects of a place. This work proposes a data-driven framework to explore the place-informative scenes and objects by employing deep convolutional neural network to learn and measure the visual knowledge of place appearance automatically from a massive dataset of photos and imagery. Based on the proposed framework, we compare the visual similarity and visual distinctiveness of 18 cities worldwide using millions of geo-tagged photos obtained from social media. As a result, we identify the visual cues of each city that distinguish that city from others: other than landmarks, a large number of historical architecture, religious sites, unique urban scenes, along with some unusual natural landscapes have been identified as the most place-informative elements. In terms of the city-informative objects, taking vehicles as an example, we find that the taxis, police cars and ambulances are the most place-informative objects. The results of this work are inspiring for various fields—providing insights on what large-scale geo-tagged data can achieve in understanding place formalization and urban design.

Study of possible contamination of police officers and service vehicles with gunshot residues

The hereby article presents the analysis of data from literature of the subject, as well as of analyses of material recovered onto microscope stubs from hands of 59 police officers and traces collected from 38 police cars backseats onto ELEVAK instrument cartridges. The stubs were checked for presence of GSR particles and the filters of ELEVAK cartridges – for O-GSR and other substances. Traces were recovered at seven district police stations within Warsaw Municipal area. The analyses were performed with two analytical techniques: SEM/EDX and GC/MS. From 1 to 27 characteristic GSR particles were found on hands of 18% officers. Between 1 and 11 of such particles were detected on the surfaces of 24% car backseats. Traces of diphenylamine, a chemical substance used as a stabiliser in smokeless powders were detected in 13 vehicles, cocaine traces were found in 3 vehicles and THC was found in one vehicle.

Pulsing

I first learned about the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, through the television. Popular news anchors provided “on the scene” reporting. I saw interviews with officials, with those present at the shooting, and with families and friends of victims. The media narrative unfolded against a visual backdrop of the club, almost always a great distance off, blocked by police cars and tape. I thought hard about that distance. I felt the repetition of the information, the personalization of the event through “selfie” photos of individual victims, and the witness accounts emphasizing the ringing of cell phones in the silence following the rampage. Reporters discussed the killer’s radical politics and his use of social media during his killing spree. Beyond these details of an emergent tragedy, though, was a well-rehearsed, overly familiar narrative frame. A recurring spectacle now grows less and less spectacular.