Citizen safety is one of the pillars for building a healthy society capable of coexisting in peace.
It is not only a matter of improving crime prevention rates but also of showing evidence to the population that this is happening. Gallup brings us a revealing piece of information from its annual survey on local crime: even though the crime rate in the United States has been steadily declining over the last decades, 56% perceived in 2022 that it had increased vis-a-vis the previous year in their local area, and 78% say that there is now more crime nationally.
Insecurity even has an economic cost and represents an obstacle to the progress of societies, as specified by the United Nations report on the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) for 2030: “Feeling unsafe in public can fundamentally erode one´s sense of well-being and reduce community trust and engagement, becoming an obstacle to development,” it states.
State-of-the-art technologies against crime
Public law enforcement and private security agencies have been using new technologies as their allies for many years to meet this challenge. The time has come to take another step in the digital transformation era.
The sector’s entities must leave behind monolithic legacy systems and paper-based bureaucratic structures. The time that security officers must dedicate to filling out forms or reports often takes away resources that could be better devoted to investigation or crime prevention. Information is often erroneous or virtually impossible to find, as it is buried in mountains of visually almost identical documents.
Our proposal from Making Sense, optimized thanks to fifteen years of experience in the sector, consists of developing state-of-the-art applications capable of making the most of the new technologies available, for example, with intelligent video solutions that automatically detect offenses.
Transparency, data quality, and reliability
We need to ensure that reporting tools supported by an excellent user experience to facilitate the work of law enforcement officers and ensure that data needs to be uploaded only once (and at the time of the event, online and virtually seamlessly) are correct and available in real-time to all those involved in any given case, both law enforcement and court officials, and both the perpetrator and the victim. The UI (user interface) is intuitive, which reduces the need for training, speeds up the data entry process, and reduces errors to practically zero. The data flow is based on data transparency, quality, and reliability.
All this while taking care of another big challenge facing this industry: compliance with legal and court regulations (such as CJIS in the United States, the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Service), data privacy, and cybersecurity.
In a fast-changing world, crime is also modernizing, updating, and using the latest innovations to improve operations. Organizations responsible for public safety must always be one step ahead to make people feel more and more at ease.