Smart Security: Integrated Systems for Security Policies in Urban Environments

Smart Security systems are applications of the Smart City paradigm for local crime prevention. Like most Smart City tools, they consist of informational and technological components that support decision-making processes. A pre-requisite for such tools is that they are supposed to be means of ongoing management and policy innovations: we therefore review some of the crucial components of a Smart Security system from the viewpoint of a local government or a local branch of the public administration, in order to analyze the high-level requisites, characteristics and potentials of such a system. The objective is to help Public officials in identifying both what defines a useful technical tool but also what is required on the part of the public administration to actually make it useful. We therefore discuss the following problems. First, we address the issue of indicators, data and the use of statistical analysis to infer the likely determinants of crime and to define risk parameters for urban spaces. In doing that, we suggest innovative tools to introduce spatial information in crime count models. Second, we discuss sensors and sensor output analysis, trying to define the circumstances that make it useful and the new possibilities offered by current technology. Then we discuss about integration of different information both from a conceptual and a technical point of view, stressing the importance of closing the gap between cold and hot data in order to realize an integrated early warning system. Finally, we discuss the problem of creating a scalable Smart Security system in a local government , indicating a list of significant international experiences.