These days, the Expo Seguridad BA is taking place in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, where the benefits of the digital transformation of public safety can be appreciated in the context provided by a Smart City. Smart Cities involve the application of digital technology, aimed at improving the quality of life of the inhabitants.
These cities are designed, optimized in the logic of solving some of the problems that are expected to appear in the cities of the future, helping to better and more sustainable management of resources, among other advantages.
However, it is essential to adopt intelligent security measures to ensure that these improvements are not compromised or threatened.
An intelligent metropolis is distinguished by the interconnection between its different actors and infrastructures, maintaining a bidirectional flow of data, which is analyzed to introduce improvements in the management of resources for the population.
Access to this information (which in many cases will be critical to the operation of the city, such as electricity or water supply) can be potentially vulnerable to cyber attacks. For this reason, it is essential that the infrastructure of the city incorporate security protocols for Smart City and security in the so-called Internet of Things (IoT).
So far the introduction, which some unsuspecting reader could confuse with a futuristic series where the heating is programmed remotely before arriving at home maintaining the desired temperature, the lights are turned on as we advance in the accesses of our house and the vacuum cleaner has diligently swept the floors of the room that I had to clean today.
All very interesting, although incomplete, since technology not only helps us in domestic activities, but also in the community, interacting with traditional security agencies such as the police, fire departments, etc., generating synergies that They will make it possible to optimize global resources to, at least, mitigate the central aspects of criminal actions.
Latent surveillance and sensitive control
There are smart devices in the region that, applied and articulated, raise not only the safety standards of the people who inhabit the spaces where this technology is used, but also in a prospective function, they become an excellent resource for preventing activity criminal.
Sometimes, those responsible for front-line citizen security areas tend to argue (in favor of their disappointing performances) that the lack of human resources is proportional to the inefficiency of their security devices in combating crime, some even go further when asserting that the ideal would be to have a police agent for each one of the blocks that has a certain urban ejido and a police mobile per block.
Certainly, the logic of the grids and the patrol devices in past times would have benefited from having human resources in quantity, but the advancement of information technologies and the Internet of Things has somehow come to solve this problem. .
The city has electronic image capture devices associated with predictive software, which, integrated into an operational control center, can provide online and immediately everything that happens in real time in a remote and determined area.
Rosario, unfortunately, has been one of the cities where the largest number of events of attacks on critical infrastructure have been recorded, where the murder of people linked to different groups linked to drug trafficking has grown exponentially this year, even registering repeated attacks on penitentiary establishments and mobile detainee transfer units.
Many hours dedicated to investigating who or who were behind these clearly violent events would have been saved had elements such as spectral control systems, discreet surveillance in the cloud and articulation of digital interaction with human resources in predetermined areas where they had been available. Certain types of crimes happen more often.
Artificial intelligence generating actuarial practices
As the police chronicles have been reporting on the attacks suffered by Judicial Facilities, prisons and detainee transfer vehicles, or on the execution of certain people ordered from penitentiary establishments, it is not possible to stop thinking if they could have been avoided. to have elements that would allow guiding investigative security activities or preventive activities based on the precise and timely exploitation of community intelligence.
To this end, artificial intelligence companies in the region have developed systems based on spectral intelligence, whose application to urban electronic security conflicts is efficient and safe.
The drone cops, for example, constitute an organized scheme of UAV (from the English unmanned aerial vehicle), linked by a cloud-controlled navigation system from a monitoring center, which can generate discreet patrolling with multiple image capture systems, sensors of different spectrums and even inhibitors of wireless signals.
This type of device in the field of Intelligent Security can be complemented with a database of images that the justice system possesses, of those persons who have a current arrest warrant based on different crimes committed or of those who, within the framework of of a certain judicial investigation, is presumed to be a member of a certain criminal organization.
These devices have cameras associated with biometric software, so the analysis is carried out at the moment, making a range of options available to the command unit for decision-making in real time.
Another version of this line is intended for the jamming of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), with a special focus on drones. In addition to detecting and alerting the presence of drones in a perimeter of up to 8 kilometers, the system shows in real time the trajectory of the drone and the exact location of the pilot. The data can be accessed remotely via cloud software and the history of occurrences is also recorded.
This technological ingenuity could well be deployed in penitentiary establishments categorized for the accommodation of inmates whose risk to society warrants active surveillance devices and electronic countermeasures of this level, since the use of unmanned vehicles for intrusions into prison spaces is systematically growing in the region. , being used frequently for the entry of prohibited substances into the prison, not ruling out that in addition, based on the multiple benefits that its versatility confers, they can be used as a system of recognition and data collection for an escape or for a coordinated attack against the prison structure; Among other events, it is enough to remember the attack perpetrated against the Piñero prison in June 2021, an opportunity in which one of the attackers died and at least eight inmates managed to escape.
Along the same lines as electronic countermeasures, absolutely all wireless communication signals in a given sector, such as a prison or a sensitive area, can be blocked at a given time (court buildings, judicial center, etc.), using emulators for this purpose. signal or deceive phones, not allowing any “unauthorized” communication to take place when this device intervenes in a certain area.
In turn, this same technology has been successfully tested in anti-terrorist security operations, since its ability to neutralize different electronic devices has been tested in different scenarios of use of improvised explosive devices (IED for its acronym in English).
Finally, and as is known, technology is always neutral and its results will depend on how it is used; but the truth is that in good hands, artificial intelligence applied to improving public welfare could increase the safety of our cities and anticipate risk situations in order to neutralize them in the place where they could potentially manifest themselves, before they occur.