With strong interest from the public, Alderman Kavita Parbhudayal together with Police Chief Paul van Musscher of the The Hague unit officially opened the Innovation Hub for Safety (Smart City).The innovation hub is a shared physical space where the municipality and the police work together under one roof on technological innovations in the field of public safety. Current examples within Living Lab Scheveningen include crowd management, drone detection, and automatic detection of boat traffic in the harbor. Visitors were able to explore these projects at a special innovation market organized for the occasion.
Kavita Parbhudayal said:“In a growing and increasingly dense city like The Hague, safety and quality of life are among the biggest challenges. I am therefore pleased with the arrival of the Innovation Hub for Safety. Here, we will learn how new technology can help the police and the municipality develop smart solutions that contribute to a safe city.”
A Safe Smart City
New technology is increasingly used to improve safety and quality of life in cities in a smart way. For example, sensors that detect unrest on the streets or data analysis to identify criminal activities. Often, these are separate initiatives, where technical, legal, and ethical conditions must be considered again each time.In the Innovation Hub, we work together on these innovations that contribute to safety in the city. By combining our strengths, we can innovate more effectively and scale up successful solutions faster.
Innovation and digitalization are closely connected to our work, says Police Chief Van Musscher.“What makes this collaboration unique is that it is not only relevant for The Hague. The knowledge and experience we gain here together will also be shared with other cities.”
New initiatives
This year, the police and the municipality will start several new projects in the innovation hub. An experiment will be launched to detect (illegal) drone flights in The Hague, and research will be carried out on smart and privacy-friendly ways to share data from camera footage. (illegale) dronevluchten in Den Haag te detecteren én wordt er onderzoek gedaan naar het slim en privacyvriendelijk uitwisselen van data uit camerabeelden.
Other cities and police units in the Netherlands also benefit from the knowledge developed in the innovation hub. Experiences are shared through the Impact Coalition Safety & Security , a national collaboration between municipalities, the police, knowledge institutions, and companies, supported by the Association of Dutch Municipalities (VNG) and Security Delta (HSD).
