How do you protect a metropolis with a population of over 20 million people from the growing threat of street crimes and attack? The authorities in Mexico City have turned to technology to find an answer.

• Faced with a steady rise in violence and criminal activity, authorities in Mexico City turned to technology to help solve the problem.
• The “Ciudad Segura” or “Safe City” programme was launched in 2009.
• A network of high-tech cameras now operates 24 hours a day, contributing to a significant reduction in “high-impact” crime in the city.

 

“Armed robberies, ‘express’ kidnappings, car thefts, carjackings, credit card fraud, and various forms of residential and street crime are daily concerns. The low rate of convictions of criminals contributes to the high crime rate. Criminals select victims based on an appearance of prosperity, vulnerability or a lack of awareness. Displays of wealth are magnets for thieves in Mexico City.”

 

Mexico 2014 Crime and Safety Report: Mexico City, published by the United States Department of Defence, makes for some stark reading. While Mexico has been named as one of the world’s emerging economic giants, attracting $35bn in foreign direct investment in 2013, the country is still battling its reputation. Drug warfare, violent and organised crime and corruption still feature prominently – and that’s something it’s keen to change, in order to capitalise on economic growth and international interest. Mexico City – at the centre of this investment – may have escaped the worst of the drug war, but its dense population of nearly 21 million, combined with underdeveloped infrastructure and traffic-logged streets, pose a serious challenge for policing. That has been made harder still by a historic under-reporting of crime and lack of confidence in the police.

 

And with one of the largest police officerto- resident ratios in the world already (80,000 police officers), it is not  something the Federal District authorities could attack with more human resources. Instead, they turned to technology to tackle crime more effectively, raise public awareness of its crime fighting efforts and, in turn, improve quality of life in the city.

 

One vision of the city

The “Ciudad Segura” (or “Safe City”) programme was designed in 2009 and installed by Thales in partnership with national telecoms company Telmex. The latter provided a dedicated fibre optic network and other communications infrastructure necessary to support the programme, while Thales supplied a range of high-end technology and created the software to cope with the scale of the project, as well as overseeing the civil work associated with building one central and five regional command centres. Before the scheme was finalised, Mexico City’s then mayor Marcelo Ebrard travelled to cities around the world to see how they managed city-wide surveillance projects and what technology they used.

 

But his ambition to transform the city into somewhere more enjoyable to live and work, for both residents and foreign visitors, placed tough demands on the project. A network of more than 8,000 cameras now records Mexico City’s streets 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It perates alongside hundreds of emergency call points (or panic buttons), as well as a fleet of drones. All of this data feeds into state-of-the-art command centres, where more than two million incidents have already been logged and response time has been reduced from over 12 minutes to 2.03 minutes since its launch. It has also seen high-impact crime, such as  idnappings, fall by 42 per cent and car theft by 33 per cent. “We haven’t found a similar project in another country that records all the time. You need a lot of space and a lot of bandwidth to do that,” says José Redon, the Ciudad Segura project director at Thales. “We have seen other projects that haven’t worked because of a lack of budget or technology.”

The programme was fully operational by 2012, along with two mobile command centres. When the announcement was made in April 2014 that the scheme was going to be nearly doubled in size, it had already been hailed as the world’s most ambitious urban security programme, for both its size and scope. At one end of the scale, license plate recognition can be used to track a single car across the city. At the other, it has been used to facilitate the emergency response to a gas explosion at a government building, as well as earthquakes, and to manage the six million-strong crowds during the pilgrimage to the Basilica of Guadalupe held each December.

 

Making it happen

To deliver the system, a multi-national Thales team was brought together, including experts from the company’s headquarters in Paris and software specialists who had been involved in a similar project (albeit on a far smaller scale) for the Singaporean police. The team developed two major pieces of software. The first, Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD), handles incident management from the moment something is detected via a camera or reported by a citizen, and is linked to all the emergency services.

 

The second is the Video Management System (VMS) from Thales, which handles the flow of data from all the cameras.

By compressing the recorded images, it can deliver the data to different command centres simultaneously. It can also not only support the existing 8,000 cameras, says Redon, but offers “unlimited growth” – a good thing, considering the additional 7,000 cameras already planned. On any shift, up to 500 policemen can each watch up to 16 cameras at a time via three monitors, in which they have CAD, VMS and a Geographical Information System (GIS) to pinpoint the exact area they are watching.

At the heart of the programme is the central Computerised Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence (C4I) centre which accommodates half the surveillance workforce – and the mayor, should any incident require his oversight. In local news reports this has been credited with giving the police “one vision of the city”.

 

Coordinated response

The success of the scheme hasn’t been just about putting the latest technology into use. It’s also been integrated into the way the emergency services work and interact with each other, as well as winning the approval of the local population.

 

There are several different police and ambulance services in the city and Guido Sanchez, director of the city’s medical emergency rescue squad (ERUM), highlights the benefits of coordination in a big city that has hundreds of incidents each day. “The ERUM only has 16 ambulances, so we can’t afford to have two or three ambulances arriving at the same place,” he says. “The C4I helps us to determine if it is a real call or a false alarm and send exactly the help needed. It also means we can dispatch ambulances from the rescue unit closest to the incident.” Response times can still be in excess of 20 minutes due to traffic and the city’s size, but Sanchez points out that “lives depend” on keeping the response time to a minimum.

 

He points to another advantage: the ERUM uses volunteers over the weekends, when there are a higher number of emergencies to deal with. The success of the scheme makes them feel safer while they are doing their job.

But not everyone likes the idea of widespread surveillance. Redon says it was important for the mayor to get the necessary regulation in place before the Ciudad Segura programme began, addressing any possible future legal challenges up front. Thales also worked closely with the government to explain what the programme implied in terms of security and citizen safety.

 

“This was a political programme of great significance to the mayor,” says Antonio Quintanilla, country director for Thales in Mexico. And although there were some complaints early on, the city’s residents quickly understood the benefits, particularly when the results started to show, says Redon.

 

“Instead of complaining against it, they complain that there are not enough cameras in their neighbourhood. They want more cameras. They want to have one close to their house,” he adds. Thales also had to adapt the system to evolving demands from users: “Over the years, as the system has been implemented, the customer has discovered new ways to use it and is obviously hungry for more functionality as they’ve gained experience,” says Quintanilla. Tracking vehicles more effectively is a good example of this: “Functionality has been developed and fine-tuned within the system,” he explains. “We’ve improved everything to do with licence plate registration and identification, and how to use that information – such as sending speeding fines directly to the driver.” Unmanned aerial vehicles are the latest addition, affording entry into high risk zones where fixed camera positions can’t reach. Both Thales and the authorities in Mexico City are keen to investigate new opportunities and integrate further technology as it comes online.

 

International scope

“In terms of smart cities, the sky is the limit. It just depends on the budget, the imagination and the ambitions of the customer,” says Quintanilla. “This type of system can be connected to all existing infrastructure – not just cameras in the streets but also in the metro system, airports, critical infrastructure, you name it. It can be expanded to as big a perimeter as you want. It’s just a matter of budget and political will.” But, he continues, each project is customer-specific: “It’s very difficult to propose an urban security or an urban surveillance solution off the shelf. It has to be tailor-made according to the specific requirements and conditions each and every customer is situated in,” he says. And that includes the operational concept, as well as living conditions and existing infrastructure. However, Redon calls Ciudad Segura an “unbeatable reference” for what can be achieved in urban security around the world – “We have proven it works in what is a very complex environment.” Thales Mexico has become a regional hub for expertise in protection systems in the hope it can replicate the same level of success for other Latin American markets. After all, six cities in the region remain in the UN’s top ten most dangerous places when it comes to murder rates. Implementing such a system could transform the lives of those living there and offer hope for a safer future.

 

“This achievement with the Mexico City authorities is a clear vote of confidence in Thales and partner, Telmex, and a compelling illustration of the performance of the system already in place, based on its success record since 2011,” says Dominique Gaiardo, vicepresident and managing director of Protection systems with Thales. “With our world-class capabilities and local skills based in Mexico, we are well placed to provide high-end security solutions and address the key issues faced by major cities in Latin America and around the globe.”

 

Mexico City may have escaped the worst of the drug war, but its dense population of nearly 21 million, combined with underdeveloped infrastructure and trafficlogged streets, pose a serious challenge for policing.

Before the scheme was finalised, Mexico City’s mayor at the time travelled to cities around the world to see how they managed city-wide surveillance projects and what technology they used.