The police department is making elaborate plans to ensure that wherever a crime occurs in the state, the scenes and movements of criminals are captured by surveillance cameras. For this, it is preparing to install one lakh CCTV cameras across the state by the end of March.
Surveillance cameras will be installed everywhere, including places of worship, religiously sensitive areas, crime hotspots and intersections. Some will be set up by the government and others with public participation and all of these will be connected to local police stations and command control rooms.
DGP Dwaraka Tirumala Rao said that the police department is taking strong steps to curb crime control through technology in the state. Plans have been prepared to install CCTVs to keep a constant watch and record wherever a crime occurs.
Police top brass have also decided to provide at least one drone to every police station in the state so that surveillance can be carried out through drones in places where there are no CCTV cameras. Drones are already being used for traffic management and crime control within the Vijayawada Police Commissionerate.
Their use will be increased across the state. During the earlier TDP regime, 14,000 CCTV cameras were installed in the state between 2014 and 2019. Special software was prepared to send the footage stored in the ‘Pi Data’ center to the collectors and SPs of all districts.
However, the YSRCP government that came after that completely messed up the management of those CCTV cameras. Moreover, the software was not even sent to the districts. As a result, many of the cameras became unusable and the crime rate increased.
After the formation of the coalition government, the police, with public participation, installed 25,250 CCTV cameras across the state. Based on the footage recorded in them, 1,989 cases were cracked and the accused were arrested. 2,434 suspects were identified.
If crimes of this scale can be solved with the few cameras currently available, then with one lakh cameras, the police department is preparing to install them on a war footing, with the idea that no criminal will escape and will be afraid to make a mistake. In the future, a system to recognize the faces of criminals will be installed in all of them.
