Attack on Paul Pelosi: A Cautionary Tale
After an intruder broke into the San Francisco home of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and attacked her husband Paul Pelosi, sending him to the hospital, those of us in the security industry wondered what kind of alarm system the couple had.
According to news reports, the home had a monitored alarm system, but no call was made to the police. Additional details about that system have not emerged. Perhaps it was simply unarmed at the time of the attack.
Importantly, however, Capitol Police also had a camera installed outside the home and if Nancy Pelosi had been home at the time, someone in the police department would have been responsible for watching it. Because she was not in San Francisco at the time, however, the camera was just one of many that a single person was responsible for watching. That person didn’t notice anything unusual at the home until a San Francisco police car arrived at the scene.
By that point, Paul Pelosi had experienced serious injuries from which he faces a long recovery.
The incident should serve as a cautionary tale about the differences between camera systems that are useful primarily for determining what happened after an incident has occurred and camera systems that can help prevent an incident or at least hasten response times.
Video analytics have improved considerably in recent years and multiple vendors now offer analytics that can detect guns, vests and masks and alert first responders. This would seem to be an important investment that the Capitol Police should be making, rather than relying on a single individual to visually monitor numerous video feeds.
Video analytics also are available for home security systems and when used on outdoor cameras, can help prevent intrusions before they occur – particularly if coupled with a voice-down system alerting potential intruders that they are on camera. Or if intrusions do occur, response times can be minimized when the intrusion has been visually verified as it is occurring.
Response times should be further improved after the industry implements the TMA-AVS-01 standard that is currently under development. The standard – which is being spearheaded by The Monitoring Association -- aims to classify every intrusion alarm into one of several categories based on priority. The lowest-level alarm calls for no police response, while the highest-level alarm calls for police response with confirmed threat to life.
A monitored alarm generated by a camera equipped with video analytics could have quickly detected the intruder at the Pelosi home and generated a highest-level alarm, which might have prevented or reduced the extent of Paul Pelosi’s injuries.
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