The Municipality of Vicente López, in Argentina, incorporated more than 800 state-of-the-art cameras in government buildings, public roads, means of transport and even in prevention vehicles.
By Security Sales
With approximately 300 thousand inhabitants and 33 km2, the town of Vicente López is located in the northern area of Greater Buenos Aires. Every day thousands of people travel, either by public transport or in private vehicles, to the City of Buenos Aires and from it to the Province.
The intensification of daily commutes in recent years, added to an increase in means of transport (Vicente López has three railway lines and a Metrobus), made the modernization and expansion of the city's video surveillance system more urgent, which until 2012 was very heterogeneous in technology and type of equipment; which made it difficult to carry out efficient monitoring in the different neighborhoods of the party.
Faced with the difficulty of executing an adequate and efficient monitoring with the 80 analog cameras that were available in 2011, a new planning was initiated to unify and optimize the operation of the cameras.
The road to multi-sensor cameras
For this transition, 600 fixed cameras and PTZ domes have been acquired initially, with HDTV and Full HD resolution, and in the following year another 50 cameras, also between fixed models and PTZ domes.
Installed the first 650 cameras, Vicente López decided to take a step forward and became the first Argentine city to adopt Multi Sensor monitoring technology (Q6000-E), a camera with four Full HD lenses to visualize an area of 20 thousand square meters with the possibility of zooming to look for a detail of the image without losing the wide vision.
The installation of this equipment places Vicente López at the forefront of global video surveillance by allowing public agents to visualize an area equivalent to four football fields in high definition with the possibility of approaching a detail while still visualizing the entire scene. This type of technological development allows for even more effective work by the police and other security agents in identifying suspects, reducing crime and delivering quality service to the population.
Vehicle surveillance
The next stage of the project was the installation of cameras in the Metrobús, which connects Vicente López with the province of Buenos Aires and benefits more than 200,000 users every day. This corridor promotes the combination of collective and underground transport, reducing travel time by 32%. The Metrobus and Transfer stations received 42 fixed domes, resistant to acts of vandalism.
The next step of the project was the installation of cameras in vehicles used by the Municipal Patrol and Civil Defense Corps, a modular system of the latest technology with local recording and transmission of these recordings via streaming. This installation reaches a total of 100 cameras. The equipment used axis F44 for this task, are ideal for discreet surveillance applications indoors and outdoors of vehicles. They are resistant to dust, rain, snow, vibrations, impacts and temperature fluctuations.
For the Secretary of Security of the Municipality, Santiago Espeleta, "this new technology will help us gain time and have greater communication between the patrol cars and the office of the urban monitoring center. It's a breakthrough in security for Vicente López."
Continuous evaluation
The conceptual change in security in Vicente López included a new way of evaluating and improving police performance. The KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are a project initiated by the Municipality of Vicente López in conjunction with the Torcuato Di Tella University that seeks to establish six indicators to measure the performance of both the Ministry of Security and the Security Forces of the region. This served for the initial support and development of the "Statistical System of the Secretariat of Security".
The first of the indicators that was worked on was the "municipal patrol with police power", which indicates the percentage of municipal patrols that carried police personnel on board in the last month. That is important because municipal patrols do not have police power, and including a police officer in each vehicle, provides great efficiency within the usual security processes, since the prevention patrol becomes a patrol with police power.
The second indicator is the "vehicle theft rate", which Compares Vicente López with other cities in the world and consists of delimiting how many vehicle thefts occurred in the last month per 100,000 inhabitants. To develop the comparison of this indicator, data were taken from the cities of New York, Miami and San Francisco, in the United States.
The third indicator, widely used internationally, is the "emergency response time", which seeks to measure the time it takes the patrol to reach the place of emergency.
Full supervision
According to the Secretary of Security of Vicente López, "the new technology incorporated allows us to make searches more accurate and faster, since we can load certain search ranges, such as vehicle size, color or traffic orientation to limit monitoring and make them more accurate."
These images are added to 500 agents of the Local Prevention Police affected by security tasks, the more than 100 patrol cars and the decentralized detachments of Vicente López. The cameras installed both on public roads, urban passenger transport stations and in municipal buildings offer a record of the movement of people and vehicles that allows to maintain order and act quickly in case of an incident. After managing to increase the monitoring capacity of the Municipality in recent years, the effects are felt every day.
With the live registration of the vast majority of the city, the authorities were able to reduce the waiting time of citizens on several occasions, as well as prevent traffic incidents. "With this state-of-the-art camera system, we make neighbors feel safe and we can respond efficiently and quickly to any event that may occur, whether it is a crime, a traffic discussion, identification of suspects," explains Santiago Espeleta.
Espeleta, vicente López's current Secretary of Security, and Martín Gasulla, the Undersecretary of Security, have received delegations from other cities and countries interested in reproducing the experience.
