LASG: Residents Registration Designed to Track Kidnappers, Criminals
The Lagos State Government yesterday disclosed that it had purchased some infrastructure, which it said, would help track kidnappers and criminals at large provided residents bought into its residents registration.
The General Manager of Lagos State Resident Registration Agency (LASRRA), Ms. Olayinka Fashola, disclosed this at a session with journalists in Alausa, noting that there would no longer be hiding place in the state if the scheme was fully embraced.
The general manager provided details about the gains of the resident registration while presenting awards of recognition to some registered residents, revealing that the state government had procured some sophisticated to assist the Nigeria Police and other security agencies in the area of crime investigations.
Fashola said the detectives or security agencies “can actually identify people with the infrastructure we have in LASSRA. So, with the kidnapping incident that involved the Orekoya family in Lagos in which their house maid kidnapped their children, we could actually verify if that lady is who she said she is.
“We have facial recognition application where if we have a good photograph of her we can quickly run through our system and verify if that was her. From there, we can look at her address. From what we have gathered, most people register with someone else.
“In this instance, we could have looked at the registration before and after to see if the addresses are the same. We could give the police a starting point as to where to start their investigations from because we have the information.”
The general manager explained that a by-product of LASRRA’s registration process “is the ability to identify and locate specific individuals as long as they reside in Lagos and are registered with the agency.”
Fashola, further, disclosed that the agency had already deployed infrastructure and manpower “to scale up to the next stage of registering residents by focusing on its social media and other online platforms.”
She added that after successfully registering over three million residents, the agency “is set to commence distribution of the permanent residents’ cards starting next week Friday,” though lamented low turn-out for the registration exercise.
She said of the over 20 million residents of the state, only three million “have been captured since the exercise started two years ago. Many residents of the state were so busy that we had to sometimes visit them in their offices to register them.”
He, therefore, harped on the importance of information the agency “has gathered. From the information we gathered from the registration, we discovered that more Lagosians board the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) buses than those who drive their cars. We discovered that a greater percentage of Lagos residents now travel by water than what it used to be few years ago.”