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A special event of national significance is a major undertaking for any public safety and security team. When the event in question is the National Football League’s annual championship showdown – aka the Super Bowl – the task can be especially daunting.

This year’s event at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas, was one of the biggest yet. For a full two weeks prior to the February 6th game, there were hundreds of concerts, fund-raisers, press conferences and other events, spread over a 9,286-square-mile region known as the Dallas/Forth Worth/Arlington (DFWA) Metroplex. In addition to the known events there were scores of spontaneous parties and other so-called ‘flash’ gatherings, advertised with little advance notice on printed flyers and via social media outlets like Twitter. (See image below for a daily breakdown of these events.)

This Texas-sized job of safeguarding the population and critical assets during the two-week Super Bowl period was managed by the DFWA region’s public safety team, supported by federal government partners and NFL security. Across more than a dozen emergency operations centers, command posts and intelligence fusion centers as well as units deployed in the field, the team monitored and when necessary responded to all manner of incidents, scheduled and flash events, emerging threats and other developments that posed potential risks to the population and/or to infrastructure deemed critical to the smooth operation of the Super Bowl.

Given the scope, duration and size of the operation, it was imperative that all jurisdictions and agencies on the DFWA team share a common and continuously updated picture of their operating environment. Keeping this common picture from overwhelming the user required analyzing masses of existing data and a steady stream of new incoming information, so as to filter out the unimportant ‘noise’ and leave only the highest-priority threats and risks to be identified and acted upon by executive and field commanders.

Our term for this pared-down view of the essentials is ‘smart situational awareness.’ In the third paper of our Inside The Box series we describe how the DFWA regional public safety team managed this tremendously complex event, and the key role played by smart situational awareness. Read and download the full paper here.

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