Fragments of FranceThis medium-sized city on the outskirts of Bordeaux is at the forefront of security: talking cameras and predictive software are being tested there.
” Hello. You are in an area where wearing a mask is mandatory, please put it on. The passer-by stops, taken aback, looks around, tries to understand where this almost divine voice comes from. In the room of the urban supervision center (CSU), Fabien Ratouin, senior brigadier-chief and video operator, is already looking at another image. About twenty screens are on, allowing to observe a hundred hotspots. The windows of the houses are blackened to preserve the privacy of the inhabitants, but everything else is visible and placed under the surveillance of cameras, one of which, experimental, is “speaking”. “I thought I was going to miss the field, but in fact no”, says Mr. Ratouin, a former gendarme, as he zooms in on the entrance to the Max-Linder high school. The day before, an assault in front of a BNP agency was immediately spotted, and the assailant arrested.
Since the beginning of the year, the city of Libourne has been equipped with this security tool, which places this Gironde town of 25,000 inhabitants at the forefront of video surveillance techniques. “The device plays on public shame. It’s very effective ”, summarizes Jean-Louis Arcaraz, assistant for sport, safety and prevention. Advances in technology make it possible to frame a license plate or search for a man in a red T-shirt across town. The images are sent in the police cars and the gendarmerie. Kept for thirty days, they can be requisitioned, if necessary, by a judicial police officer.
Since 2016, the 20 members of the municipal police are themselves equipped with cameras intended to film arrests. “I was once assaulted by a man who then denied in court, remembers Olivier Horrut, head of the service. The images were able to restore the truth. They protect us as they protect the citizen. A video operator is worth two patrols. But you need the human behind the camera. “
Burglaries avoided
“The human” is also behind an even more astonishing project, linked to the Smart Predict software. Tested here for two years, it has been fully operational for ten months. Nourished by “handrails”, feedback from interventions and everything that can be added, depending on the circumstances, donors, caregivers, social workers, etc., it basically tilts the municipal police service of Libourne into Minority Report (2002), Steven Spielberg’s film, starring Tom Cruise, in which three precognitive mutants can predict the crimes to come.
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