Quezon City sets up ops centre and strategy unit

Quezon City in the Philippines has set up an operations centre to coordinate public safety. The centre will be operationalised this month, Mayor Herbert Bautista told GovInsider.

“We will be able to monitor traffic management, crime prevention and disaster mitigation”, he said. Officials will get a central view of the city through 360 CCTV cameras.

The ops centre’s role could be expanded to cover other public services, he added, including monitoring road conditions, cleanliness and homeless people.

Departments will set up a quick reaction teams to respond to complaints raised by the centre. The Mayor of Quezon City is following a regional trend of setting up operations centres.

In Indonesia, Jakarta, Makassar, Bandung and Bogor have set up such units. Mayor Bautista also plans to set up a strategy unit to improve collaboration across future programmes, he said.

“It will be a division of the Office of the Mayor or the [city] administrator,” he said. The unit will analyse government documents and communications, and recommend steps to improve cross-government coordination.

In the past, departments worked in silos, he says: “Each department in the city government before was an isolationist. Now what we want to do is synergise their work.” Image by Quezon City Government