Technology is the future, and the Police Department appears to have taken a leaf out of it. The department has stepped up implementation of its long-pending Crime and Criminal Tracking Network System (CCTNS).
It is learnt that Additional DG (Technical) Ish Kumar was here on Friday to apprise senior officers of the department of i-Governance and review the progress of the CCTNS.
The CCTNS, a mission mode project under National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) of the Government of India, was launched in 2009 with the idea of linking all the police stations in the country.
At present, each police station is an island and this project not only connects the stations but helps in storing, sharing and accessing data, says Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police (Crime) S. Varada Raju.
According to Special Branch Inspector, Ramana, CCTNS will facilitate collection, storage, retrieval, analysis, transfer and sharing of data and information at the police station level and between the state headquarters and the Central police organisations.
It is learnt that training and monitoring are being done by the NCRB (National Crime Record Bureau) at the national level and by the CCRB (Central Crime Record Bureau) at the State level. While BSNL will provide the connectivity, the system will work on Linux operating system.
The project calls for a build-up of a database which will contain photographs, finger prints, bio-metric identification, profiles and modus operandi of notorious criminals, history-sheeters, Maoists and suspected anti-social elements and also have other details such as FIRs and case sheets pertaining to cases.
The data can be accessed by police officials across the states and cases can be cracked within a short period by matching the clues with the database, according to Mr. Varada Raju.
Central government has supplied four computers for this project to each station. The computers have already reached most of the stations and the officers are being trained in phases by the CCRB, says a senior police officer.
Smart phonesApart from CCTNS, the city police are mulling the idea of supplying smart phones with GPS tracker to its personnel.
Deputy Commissioner of Police (Crime) T. Ravi Kumar Murthy has informed The Hindu that the phones will be given to the personnel who are assigned night beat duty.