SecureCity

Inspiration

The project deals with the sustainable development goal 16 which is Peace, Justice and Strong institutions. South Arica has the third highest crime rate in the world. Thus South Africans do not feel safe. The idea behind SecureCity is to provide South Africans with the power to make safety provisions in the area in which they reside. Although there are many different approaches currently used to understand and analyze criminal trends, machine learning and IOT has not been explored by South Africa. SecureCity will use machine learning to understand and predict criminal trends. SecureCity will ensure that both the police department and South Africans have knowledge about the crimes occurring in there areas. It will ensure that citizens feel prepared and safe about the crimes committed in their area. It also ensures that the appropriate authorities and neighbourhood watch in South Africa can have insight into the crime trends around them.

What it does

The application will allow the police administrators and neighbourhood watch(NHW) members to input data about crimes committed based on police and NHW reports. The data will be displayed on the application for civilian to view and also be used to create predictive models to give civilians insight about the crimes happening around them. The predictive models will analyze large amounts of data to identify patterns and make accurate predictions about where and when crimes are likely to occur. The application will also use the data to categorize areas into red, yellow and green zones based on the crime rate. Using the reports and sensor data from our database we can provide live updates to users of crimes happening in areas. Police officers and NHW will be able to incorporate this information into their patrols. The application will display the most common crimes in the area so that the user can avoid or be alert in the area. The area of focus will be the Western Cape however the plan is to develop the application so that all of South Africa can use the application and then eventually the rest of Africa.

How we built it

We used visual studio code and firebase to develop a website for SecureCity. Firebase machine learning functionality and python sklearn library was used for the machine learning models that we integrated into the application. Firebase's firestore database was used to authenticate, secure and store our data. We used google maps API to generate our maps for the routes and hotspots.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenges we ran into while developing the website was the usage limits of Firebase Database. We loaded a lot of data onto the database and fetching the data to process was a challenge as testing required data to be fetched frequently. We were also not able to show how the data is fetched and processed on the demo as we exceeded the limits however we will show this in final as we will make a new cloud database with a new email.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of developing a solution to address SDG goal 16, as crime is a very big issue in South Africa. Our solution is very collaborative and involves community involvement which is important to help reduce crime. As people will feel more involved in the process of combating crime in their communities.

What we learned

We learnt how to use firebase and how to incorporate machine learning models using Firebase and python. We also learnt how to work with Google's API. We learnt how to incorporate different technologies into our website.

What's next for SecureCity

The application will be based on Crime in the Western Cape. The plan is to develop this application so the country will be able to use it. We also hope to develop models that are backed up by better quality data and researched based predictors. We also hope to provide BigData from our website, which will be helpful as South Africa has a shotage of good quality data. We would also like to improve on our zero-touch network were sound sensors will used to identify different crimes such as gun shots. We hope to implement this by collaborating with government to provide theses sensors in different areas so that police can respond quickly.