City police are betting big on the IT & ITES firms towards analysing data for making the department more responsive and improve soft skills as voluminous feed was being obtained from scores of CCTVs being installed across the city, observed Police Commissioner M. Mahender Reddy on Tuesday.
Technology has already helped reduce serious crime by 35%, he said, but hastened to add: “It is not about statistics. At the end of the day, we want the average citizen to feel safe”. He was speaking at the launch of an app by Synchrony Financial India. Of the one lakh CCTVs to be installed in the city, 15,000 were already in place. All private and government establishments have to install CCTVs to help in better policing, crime monitoring and prevention, he said. “The challenge is to make use of it and firms like Synchrony are helping us in analytics, back-end work and soft skill development of our personnel. Analysing data will give us more ideas to improve our responsiveness,” Mr. Reddy explained.
Technology teams
The proposed planning technology fusion centre—a command and control centre at Banjara Hills, would be a multi-agency operation centre to be ready in 14 months.
And every department would have a place for its technology teams where the CCTV footage could be analysed and feedback obtained to empower their respective field operation teams, he said.
Already, the police were tracking the response time of their patrol officers to emergency calls. “Of the 201 calls, including through Hawk Eye app on Monday, the average response time was 4.8 minutes,” he said. Mr. Reddy also said there was improvement in traffic movement in the recent times.