7. The SDIK Police Model: How to Make the Invisible Visible

The current public policy for international security is fundamentally different to that prevailing at the end of the last century. A radical change in context means that traditional strategies and urban policing models have to be revised and adapted to a new reality. Police science, new policing strategies, and approaches have evolved to give answers to new challenges in security. The police model “Science, Data, Intelligence, Knowledge” (SDIK) incorporates technical-scientific and geospatial innovations to understand emerging communities and uncover evidence of criminal activity. SDIK launched a project to study new religious movements in communities and neighborhoods of the city of Castellón de la Plana (Spain). The project combines two main objectives: first, to achieve knowledge of the impacts and perceptions of new religious organizations and, second, to establish connections between new religious organizations and other activities, some of which may be patterns of illegal or disorderly behavior. To ensure safety and peaceful coexistence in cities, it has become imperative to make visible the apparently invisible.