Costa Rica announced today a $1.5 million investment in a digital platform for a police operations center aimed at combating insecurity, one of the worst scourges the country suffers.
The project, financed by the Inter-American Development Bank, was presented by Security Minister Mario Zamora during his appearance before the Legislative Assembly’s Security and Drug Trafficking Commission, reported the media.
Centralizing coordination
“We will centralize,” the minister explained, “all the images collected by the municipalities in the aforementioned national center, from where we will coordinate police actions throughout the country.”
The initiative, which is already being developed within the Ministry of Security, will feature new software, hardware, and artificial intelligence resources, the source added.
According to the minister, the system will allow thousands of images from various police forces to be processed in real time, which will represent a transformation in public safety. The new program’s new resources, Zamora explained, will even allow for the control of traffic lights to block escape routes used by criminal groups.
A situation to be corrected urgently
Social, legislative, and NGO institutions consider the current security crisis among the country’s most serious problems, especially due to the rising number of homicides, estimated at around 600 so far this year, and the weak response to this situation by authorities, especially the judiciary.
