Before the Sirens: How Enterprise Security Teams Are Moving from Reactive to Proactive
For GSOCs, Corporate Security and Operations Teams · 2 min read
On July 28, 2025, a gunman opened fire in Midtown Manhattan. One minute after the first police dispatch, Citizen had verified the incident and alerted nearly 6,000 people within 0.45 miles. The organizations that knew first were not waiting, they were already acting.
That gap between when something happens and when your team knows about it is where organizations lack visibility. For most enterprise security operations, it is measured in minutes they cannot afford to lose.
The Reactive Model is a Liability
The historical security response chain:
incident happens > police respond > media reports > your team finds out > protocol kicks in. That model creates layers of uncertainty when time to act is crucial.
The instinct is to subscribe to more feeds. But stacking unverified sources creates alert fatigue: a flood of noise that buries the real signal and burns out analysts. The fix is not more feeds. It is better architecture at the source layer.
What Happened in NYC, Twice
Three minutes after police dispatch, Citizen alerted 1,770 users near the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting. The New York Times published hours later.
On December 4, 2024, the UnitedHealthcare CEO was shot in Midtown. Citizen's ProtectOS platform picked up the dispatch at 6:46 AM. By 6:49 AM, the incident was verified and pushed to nearby users. By 6:57 AM, 65,700 users within 2.77 miles had a verified update. Later that day, suspect photos reached 3M+ users globally.
Organizations with Citizen Enterprise in their stack had actionable intelligence while peers were still waiting on a news push notification.
Then on July 28, 2025, the Midtown shooting was verified and pushed to 5,961 users within 0.45 miles in under one minute from dispatch. Nineteen minutes later, 678,000 New York City users had been notified. The teams with first responder intelligence in their stack had an 18 minute head start.
What Predictive Security Actually Requires
Predictive does not mean forecasting. It means compressing the timeline between incident and awareness so dramatically that your response begins before the situation escalates.
Three ways Citizen makes that possible:
Citizen Enterprise Intelligence is sourced directly from first responder radio, not downstream media or government feeds.
AI and human verification before distribution - signal, not noise.
Asset-mapped proximity alerts are tied to your specific locations, not a general area.
Alerts up to 45 minutes faster than traditional emergency systems.
Under 60 seconds from dispatch to verified, mapped intelligence.
Live video from 15M+ Citizen users for on-scene visual confirmation.
Organizational distribution in seconds -- not just GSOC awareness, but team-wide action.
The best-run security operations in finance, healthcare, real estate, and hospitality have already made this shift. They are briefing their teams while the news is still deciding whether to run the story.
The question is not whether real-time intelligence matters. It is whether your current stack is actually delivering it.
Book a Demo today and take a step forward for the safety of your organization