Determined by the Federal Supreme Court (STF), the installation of cameras on the uniforms of Rio’s police officers is coming up against the reality of Rio’s favelas: as the distribution of the internet signal is controlled by drug traffickers and militiamen in these territories, authorities are seeking technological solutions to achieve connectivity and thus keep the system running.
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The obstacle was verified on the Pavão-Pavãozinho and Cantagalo hills, in Copacabana and Ipanema, in the South Zone, which has had a Pacifying Police Unit (UPP) since 2009, and in Jacarezinho, in the North Zone, where the program has been running since 2013. The government’s planning envisages having, by December, teams from all 29 units in the state carrying the device, which will transmit images in real time to the Integrated Control and Command Center (CICC).
Main Difficulty
Leading the project, the undersecretary of the CICC, Colonel Rodrigo Laviola, said that, to overcome the obstacle, the police officers working in Pavão-Pavãozinho and Cantagalo and Jacarezinho initially needed to resort to 3G and 4G chips. The two UPPs are the first to adopt cameras on uniforms. The biggest difficulty is transmitting the images captured by the cameras to the cloud, where the videos are stored. This only occurs with a fast, quality, and reliable internet network. To achieve this, the company that won the bid to provide the service needed to find a solution. It is not possible to pay for illegal internet.
No Legal Operators
In most favelas, no internet company is authorized to provide the service. The signal is clandestine and distributed by criminals. And it is not possible to use this internet in a Military Police (PM) unit.
Not Just at UPP
The problems were not restricted to UPPs. In PM barracks that are listed as historical heritage and in Highway Police Command (CPRV) posts on roads, it is also difficult to equip the base — where the cameras are placed after use to transmit images. Today there are already 170. In addition to the UPPs, by December, the Special Operations (BOPE) and Shock Policing (BPChoque) battalions must have their teams using the cameras.
Other Problems
Once the connectivity barrier has been overcome, another obstacle arises. Last month, the Rio Public Defender’s Office released a report, delivered to the STF, in which it highlighted the misuse of equipment by the troops and the lack of transparency in sending images for investigations. According to the agency, there are cases of PMs removing equipment from their uniform and placing it in the glove compartment of the vehicle. Another subterfuge is to simply cover the camera lens.
Analysis:
Most of the favela territories in Rio de Janeiro are controlled by criminal groups, mainly drug trafficking factions and militias. This control occurs both through armed men in the locations, and through the control of certain services, mainly electricity, internet, and the sales of cooking gas. These services have illegal origins and therefore cannot be used by security forces. This becomes a problem for military police cameras to be able to connect and be stored by cloud services. To transmit images, you need a fast and stable internet system, so far the solution found has been the use of internet via satellite, 3G and 4G, however the State needs to think of ways to regain control of these territories.
Source: O Globo
