Table of Contents
WHY?
- There is an urgent need for law enforcement agencies (LEAs) to adopt technology in their operations as it can act as a force multiplier.
- This is especially true in India where the police to population ratio is less than 150 per 100,000, whereas the United Nations recommends 222 police officials per 100,000 residents. But there are ways in which LEAs can use technology to increase their efficiency and effectiveness.
5 PILLARS : DIGITAL SERVICE
- One, digitise citizen-facing services. Most citizens in India dread the idea of having to go to a police station. Technology can help make this interaction more pleasant. By providing digital access to the police, citizens can avail services from the comfort of their home.
- These digital portals also provide an easy and transparent mechanism to the citizens to register their complaints, provide feedback and track their complaint status.
IDEAS
- In addition to digital portals, social media can be used by LEAs to reach out directly to citizens — providing information on traffic jams, how to protect against cybercrime, dispelling rumours, countering fake news.
- The social media interaction can be both “push” — alerts are sent to citizens — or “pull” — citizens access the social media page/handle in order to get the desired information.
FORENSICS
- Two, use it for crime detection. Technology can effectively help get a digital footprint of the criminal.
- Mobile forensics can be used to retrieve critical information such as contacts, photos, SMS, video, email, web browsing history, location information and social networking messages.
AI
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be used to match fingerprints, facial images, analyse CCTV footage and recognise vehicle number plates.
- In order to detect false number plates, AI can also be used to recognise the make and model of the car and match it with the vehicle registered with that number plate.
BIG DATA
- Three, use it in the realm of crime prevention. The holy grail for any LEA is to be able to prevent a crime before it takes place.
- Big Data can play a major role as it can be used to identify crime patterns and hot spots. AI can be used to draw correlations between the type of crime, time, location.
RESOURCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
- Four, LEAs have often not fully appreciated the impact of technology for improving internal efficiency. While most police departments in India have an operational human resources management system in place, efforts need to be put in to mine the data more effectively.
- Analysis of educational qualifications, age, gender, religion, caste, training, posting, rank, and supervisor-to-employee ratio can be used to identify gaps in the organisation.
REAL TIME INTEGRATION
- And finally, real-time integration. The five pillars of the criminal justice system are police, courts, prosecution, jails and forensics. While efforts have been made to integrate data from these five pillars at the central level, a lot of work needs to be done to integrate these systems at the state level. Countless man-years are lost in taking physical files from one place to another. Real-time integration between the information technology systems of these pillars will help in reducing duplicate data entry and errors.
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