A City Transforms its Value Proposition

Fifteen square miles, 800km of fiber, and over 1,700 cameras. A compelling beta site for enlightened technology vendors stress testing their next generation products with the purpose to create a safe, secure, sustainable, and services brand for its customer. And a data driven mindset helping to drive automated information, and real time solutions for its residents and visitors.

Welcome to the City of Vicente Lopez in Argentina.

Vicente López is home to about 320,000 people. It is a city that links the federal capital of Buenos Aires to the suburbs. Within recent years, the flow of people transiting through the city has risen considerably. Thousands move daily through the region on their way to and from the federal capital, via personal or public transport (there are three railways and a Metrobus, as well as a busy highway through the suburbs’ northern zone). The city took notice. The question was: Could the existing video surveillance system begin to play a role outside security to create a safe, secure and valuable service to its stakeholders.?

“Although we began to implement video surveillance to protect our citizens, we envisoned the possibilities outside law enforcement”, said Martin Gasulla, Deputy Security Secretary. “We knew having the right security technology architecture would allow us to offer a range of city wide services such as seeing traffic patterns, problems and incidents as well as safety issues and security incidents.

Today, the city has 1,700 cameras and has integrated them with the local security guards’ and civil defense cell phones. The hub is the Urban Monitoring Center, the heart of the video surveillance system, and ten local preventive detachments that use their own monitoring centers. This decentralizes security to key areas in the district.

The city benefits from a wide array of Axis cameras , in both dome and fixed models. In addition, Vicente López has different alarm systems, communication stations, panic buttons, lights, and a digital dispatch console, which are connected to police cell phones.

The project’s main challenge became finding a platform that supported all these security systems. The first step was to unify the three existing video management systems into one. Milestone XProtect was chosen because of the company’s DNA of an open platform and an open developer community.

The Vicente López system is connected by fiber network optics: the cameras capture an image, the content moves through the network to the VMS and is displayed in the Urban Monitoring Center, which also includes a Data Center and storage servers. Normally, the protected information remains there for 30 days, unless there is a special petition by judicial authorities or police to use or view it.

According to Gasulla, one of the biggest changes in daily operations is being able to integrate other solutions like analytics technology, which has led to better results for crime prevention and decision-making.

The objective between now and 2021 is to continue to increase the video system cameras that record in full HD, 365 days of the year. Two years ago they upgraded to Milestone XProtect Corporate VMS to leverage its federated architecture. Gasulla also believes audio will be the next big game changer. But the focus continues to be anchored by the city’s attention to the community. “If the technology is trusted and the service is trusted, we will have a better community” said Gasulla.

Listen to our conversation with Martin Gasulla on the members site