Financial Times
María Carrera Rodríguez has been going to Mexico City’s historic centre for as long as she can remember. But since the capital’s leftwing government installed security cameras there, she has never felt safer.
“This used to be a rough place,” she says, while taking her elderly mother for spiritual cleansing by one of the several semi-naked shamans standing around the main square. “Now I feel protected.”
During the past year, 6,200 security cameras have been positioned in Mexico City’s busiest and traditionally most dangerous areas. Another 1,800 will be installed by December.
Fausto Lugo, who runs the project for the local government, claims this will give the city more government-owned cameras than any other. And a plan to incorporate into the scheme an additional 100,000 privately owned surveillance cameras already in use will turn Mexico’s capital into the most monitored city in the world.
“For its complexity, solidity and the speed with which we are doing it, this project has no rival,” he says.
The initiative, called Safe City, borrows experience and technology from places as diverse as Seoul, London, Jerusalem and Chicago, and comes as Mexico experiences a crime spike arising from the government’s war on drugs cartels...[Full Article]
