Criminals beware of police database

Every single offence, nonbailable warrant, gun licence and road accident ever recorded in Telangana State in the last 15 years can now be tracked in a jiffy. For all this information has been used to create a giant database, which is updated as new cases are registered in police stations across the state.

The Telangana police’s digital tracking system is the first of its kind in the country and is now fully functional. If a man is caught in suspicious circumstances, a policeman can trace his criminal record (if he has one) within seconds by entering his vehicle number, phone number, or his full name (from his ID) in the Enterprise e-Cops software in the official’s tablet.

Earlier, it would have taken around three days to collect this information. In the past, all case diaries were physically maintained or kept as individual backups in police stations. The Crime Records Bureau of the state used to collect data from police stations periodically, but they were not immediately accessible to an investigation official because all processes were manual.

Ravi Gupta, Additional DG, Technical Services, said: "With the help of a variety of filters in the software, it is easy to zero in on one particular criminal or a particular modus operandi. Identifying a criminal used to take days, now it is done in minutes."

In the past, people with NBWs could escape even after they were caught in vehicle checks. The cops had no easy way to know about NBWs because the warrants might have been issued in another part of the state. Getting details of those warrants would take days. “The scenario has changed completely now. Not just NBWs, but even chargesheets can be accessed with a single click,” Gupta said.

The database, designed on par with ones in developed countries was created as part of CCTNS spending a whopping `61 crore and with the help of tech giants like Accenture and TCS.