advertisement
Facebook
X
LinkedIn
WhatsApp
Reddit

South Africa’s police stations of the future

reddyMajor General OD Reddy, cluster commander at the Honeydew police station in Gauteng, doesn’t just want to get criminals off the streets – he wants to keep them off.

It should go without saying – after all, that’s why we have a police force and prisons – but the truth is that a lot of crimes are committed by repeat offenders. Often criminals out on bail  continue causing havoc despite the terms of their limited release. And, until now, the police have effectively been operating blind: information from the various government departments has not been centrally accessible, CCTV cameras weren’t widely used, and following big cases was done using analogue methods like whiteboards and paper forms.

All of that will change with something called the Integrated Justice System (IJS) – a solution that’s been adapted from a similar system used by the New York Police department, where crime has decreased drastically in the last 12 years. IJS is also a part of Microsoft’s CityNext initiative in South Africa, a project that aims to bring cities in line with modern communication and information standards, while also preparing them for a growing population. Current estimates show that by 2050 70% of the world’s populations will live in cities – and using current technology the infrastructure will simply crumble.

Just imagine a city population about four times its current size, but still reliant on technology currently used by the police. It just won’t work.

For 100 years the police have been doing things the old-fashioned way. It's about to change.
For 100 years the police have been doing things the old-fashioned way. It’s about to change.

Happy birthday mister officer

With the South African Police Service celebrating its 100th birthday, this year, Major General Reddy hopes that the IJS, which being piloted in his police station, will prepare the law enforcement agency for the next century. The entire programme consists of various phases – all of which involve new technology – and will be trialled at the Honeydew cluster for the next year. During that period everything will be tested and refined, and if certain things don’t work they can be taken back to the drawing board. After all, exploits, glitches and loopholes in a criminal justice system are the last thing the SAPS needs – especially after an embarrassing hack earlier this year.

The first phase of the IJS programme involves the installation of, wait for it, CCTV cameras. The old fallback surveillance technology has benefited greatly from improvements in image quality over the last few years, so even if there were cameras the new ones will definitely perform a lot better. The cameras, which will be installed in areas deemed to be major crime hotspots, will be the first means for police officers to get intelligence on the ground. It’s not just about getting video in, though.

Want CCTV? There’s an app for that

CCTV camera installations will be complemented by a software suite developed for SAPS by Microsoft – and that’s part of the second phase of the IJS. At its heart, the software will allow for far more efficient tracking of cases, while also allowing real-time assignment of priority levels for urgent incidents. Major General Reddy explains that officers in operations centre will be able to see when reports for a bank robbery or a hijacking arrive – crimes that are usually considered to be in-progress – and use the IJS software to immediately assign urgent priority status. This means that the alert for the case is pushed to the top of the screen for all users of the system, including Reddy, who monitors it from his office, and units can be deployed.

ijs
The IJS software will let stations communicate more efficiently – with officers on the ground as well as one another.

Part of the software and CCTV system is an automatic number plate recognition system. As soon as a vehicle is marked as wanted, the system can scan the number plates of all cars in an area and send information to the control centre, where the intelligence can be used more effectively. The ultimate goal is to have all CCTV and information-gathering systems accessible through the IJS software. This isn’t just limited to other CCTV systems, like those being used on the highways around the country, but also existing systems such as the Department of Home Affairs database to access information on criminals, as well as the FICA and RICA databases. Imagine how effective the police could be if they had real-time alerts for a criminal’s movements across towns and cities, or could immediately check whether the given ID number and home address are real locations.

Privacy advocates might raise concerns that this is one step onto a slippery slope of surveillance. Cities like London, with high-density CCTV networks have very few places where people’s movement can’t be tracked – but the rollout in Honeydew won’t be as extensive. The few cameras that will be used in the pilot for the IJS will be set up in areas with known crime problems, and anybody opposed to being watched in a public space can surely understand if it’s done to reduce crime.

Nonetheless, it is a consideration. The technical team has taken into account the placing of cameras, so that no obvious privacy slip-ups occur – there should be no worries that a CCTV camera is peeping though your window.

Human senses are police sensors

Speaking to Sergio Ortega, Microsoft’s Worldwide Industry Solution Manager for Public Safety, National Security and Defense (how’s that for a job title?), he refers to the various sensors in modern cities. These are sources for information, and they could be things like systems that detect gunshots or broken windows, as well as CCTV cameras, and even humans. This is a model that CityNext embraces, as it’s impossible for a large city to rely on its own resources, but there are many information sources to take advantage of.

Adding more sensors to the SAPS intelligence network makes it easier to mine data to get the job done. One possibility being considered is having private security firms feed their data to the Integrated Justice System control centre, giving officers a richer stream of real-time information to help apprehend criminals. It’s also possible to get the community involved. There are already community police forums, which Reddy says will also be incorporated into the IJS at some point, but it’s trickier when asking the public to report incidents.

To that end, he expressed interest in a system that would allow the police to push out smartphone notifications to members of the public, for certain crimes. Rather than sifting through a firehose of unreliable information the police could then arm the public with knowledge of a crime, or even warn citizens to stay clear of an area where danger lurks.

It comes down to increasing the amount of timeous information the police has to work with when crimes get reported. Detectives and forensic departments already have science on their side, but Major General Reddy’s vision is not to investigate crime scenes, but rather prevent them. The IJS will give the police force unprecedented (in South Africa, at least) access to a centralised database that can be accessed quickly, and from any authorised terminal – a far cry from the separate legacy systems that currently join the country’s six justice departments. The data collected will also allow for analysis. Crime hotspots can be determined by looking at statistics, and then that can be correlated with an area’s demographics, income, location, and more.

In New York, where this centralised data system was originally developed, many attribute the drop in crime to highly visible policing, where officers area on every block. Given our flatter, spread-out cities here in South Africa, that would be almost impossible to achieve. But there’s no harm in using technology and citizens to put a some eyes wherever the police can use them.

advertisement

About Author

advertisement

Related News

advertisement