Odisha Police goes digital to put probe on fast track

BHUBANESWAR: Soon, identifying criminals and convicts will not take the painstaking search from district to district or even from one police station to another. Odisha Police is fast shifting from manual collection of finger prints to the digital mode.

The 1.7 lakh finger prints which the State Police has collected for several years have already been digitised and are being put into the Automatic Finger Identification System (AFIS).

The State Police plans to connect AFIS to Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and System (CCTNS) as envisaged by the National Crime Records Bureau for enabling faster analysis of data and probe process.
According to Director General of Police Dr RP Sharma, the State Crime Records Bureau (SCRB) has already procured and supplied digital finger print scanner-cum-web cameras to 50 police stations. Another 100 such systems will be procured this financial year.

“We target to cover all the 600-odd police stations in a couple of years but in a phase-wise manner looking at financial implications. This will make identification of criminals easier because all the data are being fed to a central server,” Dr Sharma told this paper. Currently, the finger prints of persons arrested in certain crimes are collected on manual slips. With AFIS being rolled out, the digitisation is also being taken up simultaneously.

However, once the digital scanners and web-cams are made operational, the biometrics would be collected and fed into the servers. Apart from finger prints, the webcams will capture two side and a front profile of the person. This would also be stored on the central database.

The DGP said next phase would be to create search options for the police officers on the go so that matching the finger prints on the database is done swiftly. This, however, would require switching to an internet environment from the current system of intranet under the CCTNS. The State Police is already working on sorting out internet connectivity for the police stations.

The NCRB had planned the central database of the finger prints so that data can be shared by States and analysed whenever necessary. The State Police has already taken steps to abolish at least six manual registers of crime records at police stations from January 1. In next seven to eight months, it plans to do away with the manual station entry system.

Centralised database

The State Police plans to connect AFIS to Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and System

50 police stations supplied digital finger print scanner-cum-web cameras

600 police stations to be covered in a couple of years

6 manual registers of crime records at police stations to be abolished from Jan 1