Gopi Reddy thought he had escaped police when he slipped out of Chennai Central railway station after stealing a threeyear-old boy while the child’s parents were sleeping on the platform. Two days later, CCTV visuals of Reddy with the child were all over television, forcing the 39-year-old man from Odisha to abandon the boy at Thiruporur, 50km away.
It is difficult to quantify the deterrent effect of surveillance, but criminals are waking up the reality of invisible policing as Chennai police added 40,000 CCTV cameras to take their number to 2.8 lakh across the city. Prompting police more to adopt technology is the fact that an increasing number of crimes having a cyber link to it. Courts these days accepting gadget-assisted findings as primary evidence, crime busting has got a tech shot in the arm.
The state government has announced the creation of exclusive cybercrime police stations in all district headquarters to handle crimes with a cyber link. These units will be headed by additional director-general of police G Venkataraman and three superintendents of police. The police force in the state, with a strength of about 1.1 lakh, is now moving towards making its ranks adept at using cyber forensic tools to solve cases. Police constables and sub-inspectors with specialisation in information technology and computers are being roped in for the cybercrime units.
In each district, a cybercrime wing will have a strength of about 20 to 30 police personnel, all graduates in computers, so that they can act as a specialised unit to crack difficult cases using technology. To aid the cybercrime wing, a dedicated cybercrime laboratory will be formed at six places—Chennai, Madurai, Coimbatore, Tiruvannamalai, Villupuram and Vellore. The state government has allotted Rs 28.97 crore for these dedicated cybercrime stations and labs to be equipped with tools to retrieve data, including deleted ones, from mobile phones, SIM cards, laptops and hard disks, apart from a software for hacking and surveillance of computer systems.
The new cyber infrastructure, apart from handling cyber-crime cases, will aid police in collecting digital evidence necessary to crack regular crime cases. In many cases, investigators have to track mobile phone records, retrieve call data and information from the computer of the suspect or the victim to zero in on the accused. “The new cybercrime units will do away with manual work, and deliver with better precision,” said a senior police officer.
To improve surveillance, the police department is looking at getting more drones. During the demand for police grants in the state assembly in July this year, chief minister Edappadi K Palaniswami agreed to buy 16 drones at Rs 38 lakh, to be distributed to all police commissionerates and ranges across the state.
Source: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/nowhere-to-hide-policing-goes-backroom-with-surveillance-cameras-and-drones/articleshow/73028513.cms