It’s not a sci-fi movie. It is the reality that technology makes possible, also for the police. And the Mossos d’Esquadra are aware that this near future is the path they must follow if they want to be an efficient security operator for society and effective in securing freedoms in the years to come. The concept of smart cities can also be applied to this digital transformation that the Mossos are spearheading at European and global level, the smart police. It is a priority of the chief commissioner, Eduard Sallent, but he himself affirms that it is the natural path and that the organization can only progress in this direction.
Two complementary plans: the street and the sensorial plan
The combination of two plans, one where the Catalan police have already highlighted, on the street, the work of the officers who go out every day to patrol the streets of the neighborhoods and cities of Catalonia – and who count on the new uniform, the renovation of the park mobile, among others, and also a new space, the sensorial plane. And this is where Mossos is making important advances. With the investment in the control of the new airspace, with the Drone Unit and the new unmanned device, of German and Israeli technology, close to military technology, which will allow more effective patrols on the coast and which also allows piloting with artificial intelligence (AI), and also with future projects to equip all police stations in the country with drones. This ability, this new sensory plan, unthinkable less than ten years ago, allows, also with the live broadcast cameras of helicopters and also of police ground vehicles, to improve the management of incidents, everyday or critical.
A police drone, the first to arrive at an incident
It will not be in the very distant future that a police drone will be the first to be able to arrive at an incident and allow the operatives on the way, and also the commands that have to make decisions, to know what is happening in record time. But not only that, the application of cutting-edge technology and AI will provide the police with information that the body is already working to know how to manage and apply. Among others, the traffic cameras, which make it possible to detect possible license plates of cars that have some kind of special tracking. Information that now already exists, but that needs to be cross-referenced so that it can be useful to the police and that allows, automatically or at the request of a human, to send a resource, a patrol, to a place. The possibilities are as limited as the police of this new paradigm can imagine. Commissioner Garcia Alvira, head of the ICT General Commissariat, is the one who leads the group of agents working to promote this transition towards the control, also, of tomorrow’s cyberspace.
Improve control rooms with inLab
Control rooms currently have a lot of information that they didn’t have before. But the command of the body, with Sallent and Alvira as promoters, want to further improve the capabilities and make the operators have even more tools that facilitate the work and make it much more effective. And this is where the Mossos d’Esquadra, with the expertise of the UPC’s inLab led by Dr. Ernest Teniente, are working with a tool that, with AI, offers the control rooms of the Mossos d’Esquadra to improve the management of police resources in incidents and improving patrol routes in planned services. Although it is still a proof of concept, these days at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona the public presentation was made after joint work with this laboratory of the UPC and the Mossos d’Esquadra.
The tool allows you to activate the necessary resources according to the incidents, according to the experience in other previous incidents, knowing how many patrols are needed to attend to a request for a fight or for a case of gender violence. The same software offers the operators a proposal for the departure train of patrols, according to the needs of the service and also the availability and response time of the police vehicles. Although the deal to acquire the technology programmed by inLab is not yet closed, giant steps are being taken. The researchers who developed it explain the exponential growth of the tool, where layers of complexity can be added, with services, types of patrols and also with response isochrones or heat maps of the concentration of criminal acts, which it will make the management and coordination of preventive patrols much more agile. The tool, which is still in its initial phase, has already interested international police officers who have stopped by the Mossos d’Esquadra stand at the MWC.
Drones, ballistics research and robot portraits
During the four days of this edition of Mobile de Barcelona, the Mossos d’Esquadra have also presented the recently acquired fixed-wing drone, which can also be piloted with AI, the Indra tool they use to investigate the trajectory of bullets, one of the key elements in investigations, and which also uses AI and, finally, also a technology that allows obtaining robot portraits of people of police interest. The future of now that the Mossos do not want to give up in order to become a comprehensive and national police force on land, sea, air and also in cyberspace. It’s not science fiction.