Mexico City has petitioned the government to fund the 2007 installation of 4,000 wireless surveillance cameras throughout the city, according to a newspaper report.
The cameras are part of a larger police effort to combat crime in the city, which has recently seen a drop in the crime rate. According to The Herald, a newspaper affiliated with the Miami Herald, Mexico City’s Public Security Secretary Joel Ortega says the city is also planning to hire and train 20,000 new officers. The increase in personnel and video surveillance are designed to work in tandem, Ortega says, with video surveillance aiding in investigations and enabling the officers to improve their response times.
The new wireless cameras, which would more than quadruple the city’s current number of surveillance cameras and cost $144 million, will feature face recognition software and the Wimex high-speed microwave transmission system. Sixteen districts within the city will each have a center from which police can monitor video feeds. The centers will be “C4” facilities, meaning they will function as control, command, communication and computation centers.
According to The Herald report, 2,352 of the new cameras will be installed throughout the city’s 1,352 administrative sectors, with some of the more crime-ridden areas receiving an unequal distribution. Another 932 will be dedicated to sectors with particularly severe crime problems. Lastly, 600 will monitor the city’s roads and highways, 100 will be used as part of the face recognition program, and another 16 will read license plates exclusively.
