MEXICO CITY (CN) - Mexico City Mayor Clara Brugada announced Tuesday a $19 million investment in more than 30,000 cameras, aiming to transform the city into the surveillance capital of the Americas.
Dubbed "Eyes That Take Care of You," the plan includes the addition of 15,200 surveillance poles to the public streets of Mexico City, connecting a total of 30,400 cameras equipped with 360-degree vision to Mexico City's Command, Control, Computation, Communication and Citizen Contact Center, known as C5, located in Mexico City's Venustiano Carranza borough.
By the end of the year, the city will be equipped with 113,814 video cameras, twice as many as New York and three times as many as Chicago and Rio de Janeiro, according to Brugada.
"With this great opportunity to acquire the thousands of video cameras, 30,000 video cameras, today begins the launch which guarantees that we can have better prevention and better attention on the issue of security," said Brugada in a press conference Tuesday.
Brugada's plan also includes strengthening surveillance in the city's metro system - which will begin this week - as well as reaching out to private citizens to provide their own private security cameras for integration into the massive C5 surveillance system.
"Soon we will be ensuring that we sign agreements with the citizens," Brugada said. "We are in this process. We want to reach 50,000 more cameras and have more cameras than London or Seoul, and soon we will achieve it."
Salvador Guerrero Chipres, the general coordinator of C5, said each new surveillance pole will have two state-of-the-art cameras - one fixed and one moveable.
The moveable cameras will be capable of moving horizontally and vertically and zoom in and out for further analytics if necessary. The poles will also have panic buttons that sound an alarm and send a georeferenced alert to the C5 center, which calls for so-called care units.
On Aug. 11, a C5 bulletin also announced an agreement between OXXO - Mexico's ubiquitous convenience store chain - and a private security firm to integrate 50 of the store's security cameras into the C5 center as part of its first phase.
Guerrero Chipres attended the inauguration of one of the first OXXO-integrated surveillance systems in Mexico City's Tacubaya neighborhood on Thursday.
The stores that are integrated into the system will have a sign that reads: "This business is an ally of C5. Video surveillance that takes care of you."
Chipres hopes to make more of these types of agreements with private businesses and citizens that can link up their own security cameras to the C5 center.
In May, two of Brugada's personal aides were murdered in broad daylight in a brazen attack, testing her administration's stance on crime in the nation's capital. Security cameras identified the assailant down to the color of his vest and motorcycle but no arrests have been made.
Source: Courthouse News Service
