By Hilda Austria/Philippine News Agency
URDANETA CITY, Pangasinan — The tactical operational center of the Urdaneta City Police Station has been fully functional since last week, with 40 closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras monitoring the city’s busy roads here 24 hours a day.
Lt. Col. John Guiagui, officer-in-charge of Urdaneta City Police, said the center is being manned by two non-uniformed personnel and two policemen to ensure close monitoring of Urdaneta, now a highly-urbanized city.
“There were CCTVs in the barangays placed by the local government unit and some around the city, but these were not enough and were not monitored. So what we did is to set up a tactical operational center where these CCTVs are being monitored 24/7 so we could respond to any incident around the area immediately,” he said in an interview Thursday.
“It is now a centralized communication center of our station,” he said.
Guiagui disclosed the additional 40 CCTVs and the tactical operation center were made possible by the initiative of the police and support of private individuals.
“We held fun run, raffle promos and some individuals donated for this cause,” he said.
Guiagui admitted that the CCTVs are vital as these serve as the “eyes and ears” of the police hence, they plan to expand it even to crime-prone barangays.
The tactical operational center and the CCTVs will be a big help for crime prevention and solution, he added.
“Since we started its operation, we have already seen some of its benefits. For instance, we were able to get the plate number of the car used in a ‘budol-budol’ incident here. And we were able to respond immediately to a traffic incident,” Guiagui said.
Budol-budol is a form of swindling.
He further said they target to install a total of 100 CCTVs around the city and crime-prone barangays for this year.
“I would also like to give credit to the former chief of police here who have started this project and we continued and finally accomplished it,” he added.
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