Image courtesy: Tribune India
In a remarkable step, Deepak Pareek, the Additional DCP-1, Ludhiana Commissionerate has linked the CCTV cameras installed by private establishments in malls, hospitals, factories, etc. directly on mobile phones of the Station House Officers and on the LED screens at the Police Stations, according to The Tribune.
The live feed of cameras all around the city will now be constantly monitored by police officers and the records will be easily maintainable. The Kotwali and the police division no. 2 became the first two police stations in the city to keep a watch on the live footage of CCTV’s provided by different organisations and establishments.
Deepak Pareek, who took about two months to get the systems installed, spoke to The Tribune saying, “We were looking for a cost-effective and scalable model to use technology as a force multiplier. Today, there is a lot of awareness about the utility of the CCTV cameras and many houses, shops, malls, schools, hospitals, factories and organisations have installed good-quality IP-based CCTV cameras for their security and surveillance purposes. However, these all-CCTV cameras are stand-alone and what was needed was a solution to integrate these so that their footage could be available at the click of a button to the police stations.”
Talking more about the initiative, Pareek elucidated to the media that the police motivated shopkeepers on main roads to share the footage of their CCTV cameras through the internet with their local SHO. An application was made available to all SHOs to integrate the footage of different cameras installed at different locations onto one screen.
Apart from the two police stations, the Ludhiana Police plan to slowly cover all police stations in Zone 1 in order to make camera footage available to SHO’s in all jurisdictions. The top court had recently made the operation of CCTV cameras in police stations and interrogation/investigative agency offices mandatory in all States and Union Territories as a step to end custodial torture.
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