The Monitoring Association (TMA) announced that Anita Ostrowski, vice president of central station services, Vector Security, and David Holl, director of public safety, Lower Allen Township (Pa.), will serve as co-chairs of the ANSI-proposed TMA Monitoring Center Notification of Active Threat Standard (TMA-ATN-01) Committee. 

“Collectively, Anita and David bring a broad and diverse scope of knowledge and experience to their leadership roles for this critical standard,” stated TMA Standards Committee Chairman Glenn Schroeder. “TMA’s goal in standards development is to provide its members and the industry at large with timely and consensus-based standards that address various operational and technology-driven processes executed by today’s monitoring centers. As our communities are seeing increasing incidents of violence and new, rapidly evolving detection technologies are being introduced, TMA-ATN-01 is vital for monitoring centers and the public safety community.”    

Monitoring centers are increasingly monitoring shot detection, weapons detection, manual lockdown notification, as well as other innovative threat detecting technologies. Human interaction initiated as part of the alert may indicate an active shooter situation. These detection technologies and subsequent alerts are typically from facilities with high human presence. 

When a monitoring center receives electronic notification that one of these systems has been activated, a standardized workflow within monitoring centers is needed to ensure timely and accurate notification to identified entities, such as first responders, employees, students and others. 

The standard will develop an efficient means for the monitoring center to provide responding authorities with information that assists with an efficient and safe response. The standard may also facilitate means to initiate other actions, such as “shelter in place,” “wait for further instructions,” and notifications via multiple methods. 

To learn more about the standard, go here.  

The TMA-ATN-01 committee co-chairs will host an informational kick-off meeting on April 12 at 2 p.m. EDT via Zoom. Those interested in attending can register here.