Case study: QIC increases customer safety through intelligent video surveillance

Warning, this story contains references to suicide and self-harm.

The Queensland Investment Corporation (QIC) needed a more holistic approach to ensuring people’s safety at their shopping centres.

QIC, owned by the Queensland Government, invests in real estate, infrastructure and private capital. Over the pandemic, some of QIC retail properties were tragically experiencing self-harming incidents.

Deb Palmer, national programs manager and project safeguard lead at QIC told Digital Nation after the centre experienced a self-harm incident of suicide by death in 2021, the centre wanted to create a better more holistic way to monitor its visitors.

Palmer said after the incident, she and her team went to that particular centre to see how the cameras work. She said the cameras were working in a reactive way, not a proactive way.  

“They are 95 plus percent Axis Communication cameras but we are using them after an event to capture something that has happened,” she said.

“What we needed to do, if we were going to actually stop incidents like this occurring, we had to stop it from happening beforehand.”

To do this, they used current provider Axis Communications to smarten their surveillance technology.

Palmer said using smarter technology meant surveying the entire shopping centre and finding high risk areas.

“It doesn't necessarily mean self-harm issues. It can be incidents like security breaches, misuse, people actually accessing parts of the centre including playing equipment, out of hours, trying to make sure that we actually harden up the asset,” she said.

Using a self-harm audit tool, Palmer and her team were able to identify potentially risky areas at the shopping centre.

“Grabbing the two years of incident reports, the audit tool, I laid out a mud map and then of the center, including all the car parks, and then identified and circled the areas,” she said.

Working with centre management team and an Axis Communications representative they identified the risk with that mud map.

“[We] walked the center and did not leave that area until we worked out the best way to stop an event happening. Now, the only reason that this actually has been successful is the group that came together on that first day that we have continued as being part of the standard. We get our risk areas and then we bring the group together,” she explained.

From this technology, QIC is now able to identify potential risks and stop them before they escalate. A control room in the shopping centre will highlight to staff working when a potential risk is happening.

“We put in some guarding virtual fencing around areas that will trigger an alert when the business rule is turned on. Then the security guard in the control room will get an alert up on their smart wall. It'll flash up the camera that's been alerted straight away,” she said.

“It also has a caption underneath that tells them exactly where this camera is. It will also, depending on the camera, follow whatever incident it is as well. In a control room, there can be a lot of things happening, so we want our controllers to be successful, what we've done on top of that is created on a smart wall of monitors.”

Using this technology, Palmer said she has not only seen the number of incidents drop but the welfare of her staff increase.

“When it comes to self-harm, we also have this understanding of protecting the welfare of our first responders, security and the teams on the ground. When something like this happens, it affects them significantly,” she explained.

“That is this breath of fresh air when I walk into a security control room and it's almost like you have no idea how, what a relief [this technology] is.”

If you are in need of mental health support, please call Lifeline on 13 11 14.