The first place in the Best Practices of Local Self-Government Competition in 2018 on the topic of “Safe Living Environment Formation

Collective Safety System: exclusive Vinnytsia project

“Our practice, that last year won the Competition in the thematic direction, emerged in the spring of 2017, and in autumn we already had conspicuous results: to a large extent we managed to achieve a full-time round-the-clock safety maintenance in the oblast centre,” explains Volodymyr Romanenko, author of the innovation and director of IT department of the Vinnytsia City Council.

In my opinion, the winning chip for solving issues that had accumulated by that time in this area was this comprehensive approach to the problem. We have set a goal to not only increase the level of public safety and public order in our city, but also to introduce proper situation monitoring at important facilities, including landscaping and communal sphere, to make traffic safe and prevent crime, as well as to increase efficiency, achieve high-quality and reliability of information received by the services responsible for the safety of the city, in order to respond promptly.”

The Situation Centre, located on the tenth floor of the City Hall, indeed resembles a large television studio, which monitors the life of the city.

Each workplace is equipped with modern computer complexes, where an operator monitors assigned area, and the general city picture is displayed on a large videoscreen.

All city schools are connected to the Centre. The monitors reflect not only courtyards of educational institutions, but also pedestrian crossings nearby and hallways of premises.

Robotic cameras that “serve” in the Vinnytsia Situation Centre can rotate 360 ​​degrees around their axis and “see” at one-kilometer distance.

It is important that employees of the Centre’s respond to citizens' messages on particular emergencies round-the-clock.

Prevent, detect, eliminate

Therefore, Volodymyr Romanenko fairly points out that the Situation Centre has opened new opportunities not only to find out the actual course of events, detect offenses, but also, most significantly, prevent them. It reliably ensures the peace of the hromada, increases the level of comfort of the life of citizens and guests of the city, creates confidence in the situation control.

The Centre has a 24-hour connection to several social networks. In addition to fixing administrative offenses, its specialists provide, if necessary, operational video information to employees of the criminal investigation office, patrol and juvenile police, fiscal service, prosecutor’s office, etc.

The material was prepared by Iryna Nahrebetska, independent journalist, with the support of the Council of Europe Programme “Decentralisation and Local Government Reform in Ukraine”

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