Ep. 26 Kevin Davis | Armored Things & Crowd Intelligence

Ralph Sita, Co-founder at Cybrary, and Kevin Davis, Chief Security Officer at Armored Things, have come together in this podcast discussing Armored Things, which is a software solution for public safety.

Kevin Davis is the fourth generation public safety, and he has been in this industry for over 25 years. He went to All-boys Catholic High School and then went into policing. He has been in policing for 22 years in George's County doing different things and got the System Police Chief. He, then, went to Colombia with Tony Batts, the police commissioner in Baltimore, and spent time with him there helping him virtually eliminate the drug cartel in the United States. Tony offered Kevin the Deputy Commission with him in Baltimore and encouraged him to get in. He worked in law enforcement for 26 years and then he got his way to working for armored things.

Armored Things is just a software solution that facilitates public safety and management in a venue. This software solution integrates with the existing tech and primarily tells you where people are around you. It identifies corporate campuses having finite geography that cares about where people are and this software solution verifies where there is a crowd of people that are not supposed to be, and where there is a lack of people that people normally are there. For example, there might be an incident among the crowd or there is something wrong in areas where there is a lack of people. This way it would ensure public safety physical security guys want to get in front of that. Organizations that run venues mostly have an after-event meeting to know what should have been differently done. Say they have ingress and egress, ticket booths, hot dog stands, and more around the area. Armored Things gets the map of where the people are and where not, and offers the data to decision-makers, so they can make the appropriate decisions in real-time. It gives them live data, so the event is managed well. Say, there are two hot dog stands which are not very distant from each other, but one of them is over-crowded, so the people could be led to the other stand rather than the crowded one. All in all, the primary purpose of Armored Things is public safety, but it is a nice management solution as well.

A hot question that is always asked is “Does this software tell you where the active shooter is?”. Kevin says it does not necessarily tell you where the active shooter is. It, however, tells you where the other people are in case there is an incident. As a result of the provided data by this software, it could be surely decided where people should shelter, where medical aid is needed or where the threat is to eliminate it. This people’s mapping around an area is simply done by wifi and the existing camera around.

Kevin thinks Armored Things software solution is a nice-to-have platform, but it would get a must-have platform one day. It is not a device, platform, or professionals trying to protect you, but it is a combination of all of them which makes it unique. According to Kevin, the Cyber Security task force has to be fortified at the moment and the tech world has to do a great job in predicting, so it would ensure public safety to an extent.