The security of public places is becoming important with the increased rate of violence and subversion. Recently, several types of research have been proposed to automatically detect abnormal behavior in public places like a car crash, violence or other hazardous events in an attempt to improve security and save lives. Furthermore, most of the researches are using supervised classifications techniques to classify the audio signals. This paper proposes the use of the kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) to reduce the number of MFCC features extracted from the audio signal and then apply an unsupervised classification algorithm. Moreover, this paper presents the results of several supervised and unsupervised classification methods for audio events detection and compares these results with the result of the proposed approach. Experiments are done using a real data set recorded at the mean of public transportation. The obtained results reveal that K-means on 2 KPCA components gave good results for triggering a true alarm as well as detecting a false alarm; where the percentages of false and missed alarms were 4.5% and 7.8% respectively; whereas these values were 0.8% and 9.3% respectively for kernel k-means. Notwithstanding the DNN network gave the best results with a false alarm rate of 0% and 1.4% missed alarm.