“Today, we have 1,000 cameras in public channels and another 100 connected in the local security guards’ and civil defense cell phones. In addition, we count on the Urban Monitoring Center, the heart of our video surveillance system, and ten local preventive detachments that use their own monitoring centres. This decentralises security to key areas in the district,” said Martín Gasulla, Deputy Security Secretary of Vicente López while remembering that in the past the system had only 60 cameras, not all of which functioned properly.

The city benefits from a wide array of cameras made by Pelco, Bosch and Axis Communications that range from PTZ to anti-vandalism, in both dome and fixed models. In addition, Vicente López has different alarm systems, 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, “which worked until we reached a certain growth point, when we opted for a more robust solution,” explained Gustavo A. Vilches, director of Exanet S.A., the integrator company involved.

Exanet chose Milestone Xprotect Professional video management software (VMS) to manage the project’s demand for a growing number of cameras. “One of this solution’s biggest advantages as an open platform that allows us to offer additional solutions to our clients,” Vilches explained.

The Vicente López system is connected by fibre 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 centre 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.

Santiago Espeleta, Vicente López Secretary of Security, says that 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.”

According to him, one of the project’s biggest challenges was the financing by public resources. “This is our residents’ money, and for this reason every decision was made extra carefully. We couldn’t afford the luxury of making errors, so we searched for top-of-the-line providers, analyzed them and made a decision,” he affirmed.

According to district authorities, the objective between now and 2019 is to increase the video system to 1,500 cameras that record in full HD, 365 days of the year. Vilches says they are studying the possibility of upgrading to Milestone Xprotect Corporate VMS to leverage its federated architecture.

Espeleta concludes that combining the human element with advanced technology is what guarantees the community’s well-being. “As a local government, we must work to ensure that people live better every day, and we can do so by employing trustworthy, high quality technology.”