The internet of things in community safety and crime prevention for South Africa

Abstract

One of the major tasks of the South African government is to reduce crime levels on a year-to-year basis. The use of information and communications technologies (ICTs) is capital in facilitating the process to finding solutions to crime. This paper is about taking advantage of a particular subset of ICTs that is referred to as the internet of things (IoT) in the fight against crime, and that is community safety and crime prevention. The paper identifies not only the sectors of the economy that fall under community safety and crime prevention such as police efficiency and accountability, situational crime prevention and social crime prevention, but also a number of IoT applications that can be of value in these sectors. By drawing on the characteristics of identified IoT applications, the research came up with the architecture of an integrated IoT system for tracking of parolees who have violated their bail conditions, as a case study.