KARACHI: An alarming surge in street crime in the metropolis has forced residents and private businesses to take their own security measures and over the past one month citizens have installed over 4,000 surveillance cameras, which helped law enforcers identify muggers and robbers, it emerged on Tuesday.
Confirming that 4,000 CCTVs had been installed by citizens in March alone, Karachi police chief Additional Inspector General Ghulam Nabi Memon claimed that street crimes had significantly come down in areas where CCTV cameras had been installed.
He pointed out that under the Sindh Security of Vulnerable Establishments Act, police were persuading and encouraging citizens to install CCTV cameras at their offices and homes to obtain evidence by use of modern devices and the performance of police was also assessed to this effect on a monthly basis.
He said it was incumbent upon the SHOs to obtain CCTV footage of crimes. “The suspects are being identified with such footage and being taken to task on a daily basis,” said the senior officer.
Police chief says 4,000 cameras installed by Karachiites in a month deterred criminals
Such modern devices immensely helped investigators detect criminals, he said.
‘Street crime on decline’
He claimed that street crimes had come down in the metropolis because of extensive use of technology that detected, identified and exposed criminals.
He said he held a meeting with DIGs, SSPs, SSPs investigation and head of different specialised units, the other day. “We analyse the crimes data, which show that street crimes are on decline,” he said.
Mr Memon said the police assessment showed the crimes had significantly reduced in those localities where the citizens had installed CCTV cameras.
Prosecution
He also revealed that for successful prosecution of cases, three teams had been established at Garden, Jamshed Quarters and Korangi respectively for online hearing of cases.
He said initially they were focusing on video-link hearing of rape cases as rape survivors were reluctant to give evidence in presence of several persons in court. Besides, video-link hearings are also being arranged in the cases where witnesses feel threatened of their security, he added.
He said in order to reduce workload on police investigators and for better prosecution, four types of criminal cases — namely murder, robbery, rape and narcotics — were being separately assigned to investigation inspectors.
He said for providing assistance to the investigators, one modern computer lab had been established in every district of Karachi.
In South district, one such computer lab was set up in Defence, where modern computers, printer, scanner and UPS had been provided apart from comfortable seating arrangements, he said.
Computer operators have also been recruited for helping the investigators to prepare case files, ending the old practice of preparing investigation reports manually, he said.
The city police chief added that the Sindh government had recently recruited 110 inspectors (legal) who were law graduates directly while 140 other investigation inspectors had also been recruited.
He said that two such inspectors had been deployed at the modern computer lab in each district for scrutiny of case files and improving the standard of investigation.
The Additional IG said it had been noticed that certain elements had submitted fake surety or bonds to get criminals released from prisons. He said they were facilitators of the repeated offenders, therefore the police had decided to launch a crackdown on such criminal elements and this task had been given to the 110 inspectors (legal) to compile data of such persons and take them to task.
Published in Dawn, April 6th, 2022
from The Dawn News - Home https://ift.tt/Fsm0x7q
No comments:
Post a Comment