SIES-M Integrated Emergency & Security Camera Network
Medellín's Secretaría de Seguridad y Convivencia and the National Police jointly run SIES-M, an integrated camera and emergency-response network inaugurated in October 2011 with roughly 350 cameras. It has grown to more than 3,230 cameras — including license-plate readers and facial-recognition units — feeding one command center alongside the 123 emergency line, body cameras and a police helicopter.
📊 Impact
A peer-reviewed study (Gómez, Mejía & Tobón, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 2021) tracking camera installations across Medellín in 2013-2018 found a 26% drop in violent crime and a 17% drop in property crime within 120 meters of a camera, with no measurable displacement to nearby blocks.
🎓 Lesson
A camera-specific, quasi-experimental study can isolate this system's own deterrent effect — a rarity — but that doesn't make it the explanation for Medellín's much larger, multi-decade homicide decline, which has many other, non-technological drivers.
📖 Terms in this entry: Adaptive traffic signals · ANPR (automatic number-plate recognition) · Digital twin
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “SIES-M Integrated Emergency & Security Camera Network” — Medellín, Colombia. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/medellin-sies-m/ (last verified 2026-07-30). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.