Cops bet big on 3rd eye to curb crimes

The police will soon keep an eye on Chennaites, all the time and across all public spaces, if the department chief is able to implement the plan.

“We want to install CCTV units across the entire city by September,” police commissioner AK Viswanathan had announced a week ago. “The project will ensure safety and security of every citizen. The efforts are in full swing to bring the entire city under CCTV surveillance,” he had said.

While such a system is common in major cities across the world such as New York and Beijing, the city police have many reasons to push for installation of surveillance cameras across Chennai. An important reason being that CCTV footage is the most effective way to tackle crimes in the city.

Be it chain snatching or murder or road-side skirmishes or police-public conflict, CCTV footage have been of great help for the police when it came to solving crimes.

The police have also been asking commercial complexes and residential association to install CCTV cameras as a safety measure since 2010. In eight years, Chennai managed to install around 20,000 cameras but the police want to increase the number to 1 lakh now. They have also been conducting door-to-door campaigns, calling on households and commercial establishments on every street, asking them to set up CCTV cameras.

The police believe that if every commercial or residential establishment installs a camera outside their premise, 80 per cent of the city’s area will be under surveillance.

Also, to realise his dreams to bring the entire city under CCTV surveillance, the police commissioner had recently roped in three members of Parliament to extend financial assistance for the project. The police also have plans to rope in certain government and welfare organisations to help set up the cameras in public places. They have also written to civic authorities to make it mandatory to install CCTV cameras in new buildings before obtaining plan approvals and other permissions.

Speaking to DT Next, a senior official said that CCTV cameras would not only help crack the obvious crimes such as murders, burglary and robbery but also other cases. “So far, most of the cases were solved with the help of mobile phone towers to find out where the accused were at the time of the crime,” said the official. “But offenders have become smarter and leave the phone back when they step out to commit crimes. With the CCTV surveillance, however, the possibility of offenders getting away with their crimes is reduced to a great extent, as their actions would be caught on camera,” the official added.

“Even if the accused say that they were at a particular place at a specific time, it can be cross-verified with CCTV footage retrieved from the area. This way, the offenders can easily be trapped,” said the official.

MGR Nagar inspector Frank D Ruban said that the work to cover all the streets in the area under surveillance is under way in full swing.

“In MGR Nagar, 136 cameras have already been installed at 56 places with active support from the residents. Work is on to install 86 more cameras,” the inspector said.

The inspector added that it has been made compulsory for jewellery shops, banks, ATMs to have complete CCTV surveillance. Ruben, himself has installed about 150 cameras in Koyambedu where he had been posted earlier and ensured that all six police booths in Kundrathur, where he was had worked earlier, has CCTV surveillance.

Interestingly, miscreants have also managed to find a way to thwart CCTV cameras. There have been instances where they escaped with digital video recorders (DVR) which stores the CCTV video. To combat this, the police has been encouraging the public to invest in Internet Protocol (IP) cameras with Network Video Recorder (NVR). “Unlike DVRs, NVRs are tiny and can be concealed easily, making it difficult for law breakers to find it,” said Ruben.

Speaking about residents’ response, Ruben said that people have been cooperative. “They readily oblige us when we ask them to install one camera facing the road,” he said. But, while people in areas such as Anna Nagar, Ashok Nagar, have responded positively, those in areas like Pulianthope and MGR Nagar are taking time to accept the project.

The police are also installing close to 2,000 CCTV cameras at important junctions in the city while their control rooms will be set up at inspector, deputy commissioner and commissioner’s offices. The tender for the project would be finalised by August 15, said a senior official. “About 40 bidders attended the pre-bid meeting and once the tender worth Rs 90 crore is finalised, the work will start from August 31. They will be given three months to complete the project,” said a deputy commissioner. The project includes installing cameras with features to recognise faces and read number plates and those that could be temporarily mounted on patrol vehicles. “Each of those cameras cost about Rs 30,000 and will be funded by the government. The mountable cameras will be used in public meetings and in places where law and order issues arise, to monitor the movement of miscreants,” said the official.

Apart from the awareness short films released by actor Vivekh and others, the police have resorted to innovative campaigns to convince people why it is necessary to install CCTV cameras. “We tell housewives that it is going to cost just a sovereign to save the rest of their jewellery and ask men consider the changing a wheel in their car, as compared to losing their car to vehicle stealers,” said a police source.

China is setting up a vast surveillance system that tracks every single one of its 1.4 billion citizens - from using facial recognition to name and shame jaywalkers, to forcing people to download apps that can access all the photos on their smartphones. The growth of China’s surveillance technology comes as the state rolls out an enormous “social credit system” that ranks citizens based on their behaviour, and doles out rewards and punishments depending on their scores. At least 16 cities, municipalities, and provinces across China have already started using a facial recognition system that can scan the country’s entire 1.4 billion-strong population — with 99.8 per cent accuracy, Chinese state media reported. China’s facial recognition surveillance has already proven to be eerily effective: Police in Nanchang, southeastern China, managed to locate and arrest a wanted suspect out of a 60,000-person pop concert in April, the state-run Xinhua news agency had said.