Mxico Seguro: an Ipod application for monitoring crime levels

Marco Gavio, Vianey Jurez Araujo Tecnolgico de Monterrey Campus Ciudad de Mxico alexandre.macedonio@gmail.com Abstract
Security risk in Mexico City has increased over the last five years. Many people has experienced steal, robs and kidnaps. Thats why we decided to develop an iPod application to help people suffering from this problem, which we called Mxico Seguro. Mxico Seguro is based on statistics updated by victims advertisements, and its goal is to keep citizens aware of the places where their security is more vulnerable by providing them information, in real time. The Mxico Seguro application was developed with Objective-C language, to be used in an iPod platform, with a hierarchal architecture and it uses a remote database, so many users can update it every time they decide to report a crime or check the insecurity area statistics. It is divided in two different views; one to publish a crime and the other one is to check the percentages.

2.1. Publishing a Crime

This view has two options; one to publish the crime with your current location given by the iPhone GPS, and the other one is to enter the location step by step; defining the street and area where it happened so you dont have to be exactly at the same spot where it happened.

1. Introduction
Mexico city is the third most insecure state in the country [3], even tough not all of the crimes are reported. This is caused because the police department has a really bad reputation on corruption, bad administration and because many times they dismissed many reports [1]. This is why we decided to create an application to help citizens to accuse any offense they suffered in the city with a quickest way, and also notify other citizens where they should be more careful. In the other hand, mobile applications are becoming more and more popular, and specifically, iPhones. In Mexico there are more than 69000 users of this device (and this is just 3Gs model), and in the world this number is expected to be 100 million in 2011 [2]. Having this statistics we decided it was a good idea to develop this project to notify and report crimes as an intuitive iPod application, with the advantage that its popularity is increasing and because it would be an easy way to manage the information. With this project we expect users to avoid suffering from this unfortunate situations by keeping them aware of the most dangerous zones in the D.F. area and bringing them an easy way to publish incidents.

2. Features

2.1.1.View
This is the first view of the application, where you can select to publish a crime, or consult the statistics, and also choose how you want to publish the incident.

2.3.1.View

2.2. Detailing the incident

After entering the location, you get a view where you can select the option that describes better your incident, if it was a rob, steal or a kidnap. Also you can specify the date and the hour and give a brief description of how it was or how it happened. This is to have more complete information about the incidents and be able to classify then.

2.2.1.View

In this view, a table is shown, where you can see the percentages of the crimes.

3. Conclusion
In this work we introduced Mxico Seguro as a mobile application for the anonymous reports of crimes, and in this way, obtain as more information as we can to inform our users. Also we expect that resident and tourist people can have enough information about the insecurity places in the city and they can take the choices of where to go but always weigh up the risk, so they can take smart decisions. This goal may sound unreachable but we believe it is better to start taking some actions rather than just watch crimes increase, and by the more users we get, the more conscious people we expect to achieve. This is the view where you can describe how the incident happened.

10. References
[1] Instituto Ciudadano de Estudios Sobre la Inseguridad, Estadsticas, [Electronic]. http://www.icesi.org.mx [2] NoticiasTech, Mxico en el cuarto puesto de iPhones vendidos, Ingeniera WordPress. [Electronic]. http://noticiastech.com/ [3] NOTIMEX, Las trece ciudades ms inseguras del pas. [Electronic]. http://www.lasnoticiasmexico.com/4994.html

2.3. Statistics
In the statistics view you can consult the incidents percentages, it is presented on a table, which shows the 16 different areas in Mexico City. This information is taken by a web service, which has information based on the published numbers of the Ministerio Pblico del Distrito Federal, and it is real-time updated every time a user reports a crime.