Deaf Police Officers Fight Crime

OAXACA, MX. – Deaf police officers fight crime in Oaxaca. The officers, known as ‘Angels of Silence,’ contribute to keeping the city safe with their heightened vision and ability to read lips.



The 230 surveillance cameras that monitor the streets of the historic downtown area of Oaxaca – a southeastern city that was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987 – are watched by Deaf police officers who maintain a close eye.



The Oaxaca Police’s Command and Communication Control Center (C4) was reopened in May after chronic maintenance problems had kept it closed for six years. But since the surveillance cameras do not have microphones, the authorities had been unable to determine what was being said by suspected criminals.



So officials turned to State Association for the Deaf to provide personnel with a keen sense of sight and ability to read lips, said Ignacio Villalobos Carranza, deputy secretary for Information and Institutional Development at the Public Safety Secretariat of Oaxaca.



The move has enabled the C4’s Deaf police officers to help prevent crime and assist officers on the streets to apprehend suspects, making the downtown area – a major tourism attraction – safer.



“The first advantage the [Deaf police officers] provide is that they can read lips,” Villalobos Carranza said. “The second advantage is because the Deaf police officers have developed an acute sense of sight – they can see better than most people.”... Read more http://infosurhoy.com/cocoon/saii/xhtml/en_GB/features/saii/features/main/2012/10/19/feature-01



As seen on article: Deaf Police To Monitor Security Cameras

Deaf Police To Monitor Security Cameras

OAXACA, MEXICO (BBC) - The Oaxaca government has invested 56 million pesos ($4.4 million) to place at least about 230 security video cameras in the downtown historic city of Oaxaca and the suburbs that are monitored by deaf and speech impaired police. The camcorders are 15 meters (49 feet) high and can reach various points simultaneously with an infrared camera. Ignacio Villalobos Carranza, Deputy Secretary for the Ministry of Public Security of Oaxaca, said most of the monitoring of the 230 cameras is done by law enforcement officials that are hearing or speech impaired. He noted these police officers have a very strong deaf and visual sense and can better detect what is happening in different places where the cameras are located; they can often remotely read the conversations of people, to the benefit of this security system that operates 24 hours a day. Spanish-language video from BBC Mundo

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Deaf police to monitor security cameras in Mexico - The ability to lip read conversations is a fantastic advantage, but the project raises the question of whether deaf people would actually be better at security monitoring in general. As far as I know, there are no studies comparing hearing and deaf people on specific monitoring tasks but there is evidence that deaf people have certain advantages in visual attention. This isn’t vision in general, such as having sharper visual acuity – where there seems to be no difference, but there is good evidence that deaf people are better at noticing things in the periphery of vision and detecting movement. This potentially makes them perfect for the job and likely better than their hearing colleagues. So the project turns out to be a targeted way not of recruiting ‘disabled people’ into the workforce, but of recruiting the ‘superable’. In fact, turning the whole idea of disability on its head. Source: http://mazmessenger.com/2012/05/26/quick-news/deaf-police-monitor-security-cameras/