Progress has been made on the bill that seeks to strengthen municipal institutions in the areas of public safety and crime prevention. It is currently in its second reading and is being reviewed by the Senate Public Safety Committee.

This was reported by one of the members of the legislative body, Senator Kenneth Pugh, who explained that a total of 53 amendments are being worked on and 39 have already been voted on to date. “We are 75% of the way through the work, and the main objective is to improve municipal institutions in this area, reducing the disparity between the resources and tools available to different municipalities for crime prevention and helping them move toward situational prevention approaches in urban design,” he said.

It should be noted that the initiative creates a new institutional framework in municipalities for public safety and crime prevention, where, according to Senator Pugh, “the position of Municipal Safety Inspector is created, who is given powers and protections ranging from legal to physical.”

The powers of this new municipal security inspector are currently being discussed in the Public Safety Committee, where senators have added functions that would be divided according to their degree of autonomy, with some requiring police supervision, such as drug and alcohol control and identity checks; Others can be carried out autonomously, such as preventive patrols, the seizure and confiscation of goods from street vendors, and support in the control of precautionary measures, with the aim of reducing the workload of the Carabineros in cases of defendants under house arrest or prohibited from approaching the victim in cases of domestic violence.

As part of the review of the bill, senators also expanded the grounds for flagrante delicto, increasing the time limit from the current 12 hours to 24 hours. There was also an extension for inter-municipal coordination, as initially, deputies only allowed coordination of operations between neighboring municipalities. However, this was expanded so that municipal inspectors can operate jointly with municipalities without territorial proximity. In addition, they addressed the inclusion of remote surveillance systems so that application databases, such as Sosafe, can be used.

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Source: Diario Concepción.