“80 percent of neighbors did not report crimes for fear or lack of confidence in authorities. Today, that has changed. Now neighbors are getting used to reporting robberies, assaults, accidents, suspicious vehicles, and noise.”

- Fernando Andrade, Miraflores Mayor

Customer Profile
Miraflores is a municipality of Lima, Peru that lies along the Pacific Ocean. The city has approximately 100,000 residents and is a bustling commercial and residential center.

Situation and Challenges
In the late 1990s, Miraflores was experiencing escalating crime (e.g., robbery, assault, and drug possession, etc.) that threatened to hinder tourist and business activities, and impact quality of life. The municipality set crime reduction and deterrence as a major priority. While the city took proactive steps to increase its security patrol and establish a central phone number for citizens to report crimes, Miraflores needed the ability to respond quickly to reported crime, provide feedback to citizens, and monitor trends. The existing manual, paper-based system that security officers used to record crime reports provided minimal data transparency and accountability.

Solution
In 2003, Voxiva and Miraflores municipality collaborated to deploy Voxiva CitizenNet^TM (known locally as Alerta Miraflores), a phone- and web-based public safety solution. Alerta Miraflores allows residents to dial a central number that connects to an automated incident reporting system. Upon completion of a call, a report is instantly captured in a central database that is monitored 24 hours a day by security officials at a command center. Within seconds of a report being logged, officials contact the citizen and initiate action. If a caller reports an emergency, officials confirm incident details and immediately dispatch an ambulance or police. The action taken (and whether the case is in process or resolved) is recorded in the central database that is viewable by all authorized users, and ensures transparency and accountability. A historical record of all reported cases is continually maintained and available for review and trend analysis.

The Alerta Miraflores central phone number is displayed throughout the city

Alerta Miraflores provides the municipality with a rich data set for analysis, decision-making, and monitoring of trends. The Miraflores Public Safety manager regularly generates a comprehensive report of charts and graphs showing crime statistics by type, location, time of the day, day of the week, and month of the year. This information has been used to re-allocate resources to locations and times of greatest need, and to justify additional resources.


Benefits

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GIS-based map displays crime prevalence by type and zone.

The benefits of Alerta Miraflores include:

  Enhanced Data for Decision-Making: Alerta Miraflores’ detailed registry has enabled authorities to perform thorough crime trend analysis. These statistics have been used to drive decision-making. The Chief of Police used Alerta Miraflores data to justify expanding his police force and a City Hall official implemented a noise reduction campaign based on a high frequency of noise complaints.

  Improved Public Safety and Citizen Satisfaction: Public safety is one of the three most important issues to Miraflores citizens. By improving its ability to rapidly respond to reported incidents, providing timely feedback to citizens, and capturing detailed crime information, the municipality is better able to prevent crime and increase citizen security.

  High Report Reliability: Alerta Miraflores captures a very low percentage of false reports. Since its launch in 2003, 98% of the reports logged by the system were confirmed criminal activity (robbery, assault, drug possession, prostitution, and delinquency). The high report reliability ensures municipal staff dedicate their time to responding to legitimate cases.

  Multichannel Access: Alerta Miraflores supports integrated communication across channels (phone, web, text messaging, and e-mail). Citizens can leave voice messages that are stored in the centralized database in a voice-clip format, and authorities can respond via their preferred method of communication (e.g., text message, phone, or the web).