Boston College Bring in Evolv Technology to Make Game Day Safer

[0:04]The environment here at Boston College, and you've lived on the campus, you feel like it's your own home. You don't want to make people feel like they've got to go through all kinds of security practices to get in and out. You're never going to be able to keep 100% of the stuff away from your venue. You just want to make it as hard as possible for anybody who's going to try to do something negative to your to your facilities. Getting them through the weapons technology process quickly, which is what Evolv allows us to do. I would say we've taken our our wait time in the case of basketball and ice hockey, we've gone from 15 minutes uh probably down to about five minutes total to get through that entire process. A huge piece for me was the fact that I can sit in our command post on game day and see a live number of how many people have been processed through the Evolv. Having access to that data and then using that data to redeploy our units based on what gates need more units from game to game. It's not only myself uh receiving that data. It is our police department who's getting that data, dispatch is getting it, they can watch it. The nice thing about the Evolv system is there are different levels you can operate on. We started at one of their lower levels as the season went on, we started to step those levels up. And our detection rate went from 8% to 12%, which was a good thing for us because it meant that technology was working. The transparency of Evolv has been very good. Like one of the things that they are very specific about is at each of the levels the things that will get through. I mean they are very open and honest about the fact that very small pocket knives, those type of things may get through the technology. That's not really what we were looking for, you're really looking for things that can do mass casualty damage to people. A small pocket knife, you can live with getting through the system and I think they were very open and honest about that. Now, if we want to keep those items out, we can continue to raise the level of the system and keep more and more of that stuff out if we want. The notification system that's available on the tablet, uh was a huge piece for us. The ability to make a notification that if we have an issue at gate A and we've we have detected a weapon, that individual can automatically signal from their tablet that they need assistance from our police department. We've got a number of individuals who are dispatched to to deal with that scenario. We are subscribing to Evolv. I didn't want to own that technology because I didn't want it to get old. We've been with Evolv now for six months, I think we've had four software upgrades. As that software starts to learn our facility and starts to improve its technology through its knowledge, they make those software upgrades. We've just worked with our fans to really do a good job of communicating those processes and I think ultimately they appreciate and understand our need to not only protect them, but also to protect our student athletes and again the students who are in our venues and live on our campus.