Police Modernization projects in India are waiting for the INTELLIGENCE DIVIDEND

Introduction

Last decade has seen a spade of Police Modernization projects in India, including CCTNS Phase 1, which intends to computerize the famed FIR process in 17000+ police stations across 36 states and union territories of India. Add to this CCTV surveillance projects in various cities & states, Traffic Enforcement projects such as e-Challan system, modern control rooms to address emergency responses such as Dial-100 et. al. and we're talking of several hundred crores of tax payer money spent on our safety & security. And now we wait for CCTNS Phase 2 project, which aims to implement Integrated Criminal Justice System (ICJS) covering Courts, Prosecution, Prisons, Criminal Biometrics and Forensics. 

Yet we're far from having a police force which can track known criminals and terrorists, predict their next moves such as Pathankot siege, deploy police force to avoid the next crime, curb human trafficking, improve traffic discipline on our roads or to significantly increase conviction rate from an abysmal ~45% today in India. Clearly, Police Modernization projects in India have failed to deliver any substantial INTELLIGENCE DIVIDEND till date.

Learnings from UK

I think it's important that our internal security think tank takes some cues from the learnings of other countries, especially Great Britain. I say Great Britain because we did inherit police organization and structure from them and still continue to operate it that fashion, even though on a much larger scale. And more so because UK has also gone through similar challenges as us as they also invested on Police Modernization projects over decades. But they learned from their own mistakes and improved to derive tremendous benefits. British intelligence claims to have foiled 7 major terrorist incidents in 2015.

Let's look at a case in time on CCTV surveillance. On face of it and theoretically speaking, we can put cameras at all sensitive locations across our cities and keep a check on criminal activities. But having seen Police Control rooms with massive video walls, I can tell you this job is easier said than done. There can't be just enough number of cameras and enough number of eyes to check each and every move. The backbone of UK's "Ring of Steel" surveillance system covering London Metropolitan area (and further extended to cover 7 surrounding counties and M25) is not only the camera system but the Athena program and it's highly intelligent POLE database. Movements and activities of convicted criminals are captured on the fly into People-Object-Location-Event (POLE) database, be it their release on parole or their movement across the country, thanks to modern technology such as ANPR and AFRS. And so, it's probably foolish to spend a million pounds on putting up a camera backbone in a city and yet not link it to an intelligence database and to other systems such as Dial-100 or CCTNS.

Traffic offences across the UK are managed in a centralized penalty management system (Pentip), which ensures each and every traffic offence is handled properly. And more importantly, repeat offenders are caught no matter which part of the country they're driving. This alone helps avoid hundreds of road deaths across UK. An intelligent back-end system is crucial for our country given the state of traffic behaviour we see across India.

UK's Civil Contingencies Act (CCA) 2004 and the Emergency response and recovery guidance talks about 8 guiding principles namely Anticipation, Preparedness, Subsidiarity, Direction, Information, Integration, Co-operation and Continuity for effective handling of emergencies to ensure there's no loss to human life and property. No wonder an ambulance is mandated to reach the patient within 8 minutes in London. These are possible because they've built intelligence on top of the information from their emergency response handling system. Especially the use of geo-spatial incident information and advanced analytics on top of it can help predict next crime and can help reduce time taken to reach the location of incident to avoid any harm to human life and property. It's high time we not only modernized our Dial-100 service, but expanded it further to cover multiple agencies (fire and ambulance), link it to case management (CCTNS) and built a geo-spatial analytics layer on top of it.

Forensics labs across UK have implemented a Forensics Case Management system, which not only ensures high level of efficiency within the FSLs but also links those to Police Case Management and Criminal Justice system. And now they're moving to a cloud based implementation, further integrating them to national system thereby helping them share information and intelligence. Today, FSLs across India continue to use paper based manual processes, grossly incapable of handling a huge backlog of criminal cases. Inability to work on them denies justice and reduces our conviction rate, resulting in lack of faith in our justice system.

A National ANPR System and a National Crime Registry are some of the other examples, which show how UK has worked hard to prioritise intelligence as a necessary outcome of their police modernization projects.

Conclusion

To summarize, learnings and experiences from UK can guide us on following next steps to significantly increase the intelligence outcome from policing:

- Security establishment across states and country should build an equivalent of a POLE database which takes inputs from various Police IT systems and incrementally builds intelligence information

- CCTNS phases 1 and 2 should get implemented very quickly and should integrate all the elements of criminal justice system encompassing case management, courts, prosecution, prisons, forensics and biometrics.

- any/all CCTV and ANPR implementations must necessarily feed into national POLE/security database

- emergency response systems such as Dial-100 system should be capable of recording geo-spatial information of incidents on top of which advanced analytics could be built

- police organization must invest on analytics on top of POLE, CCTNS, Emergency Response Handling and CCTV systems

- analytics should be built to track criminals, sex offenders, pedophiles and human traffickers.

- traffic enforcement should be centralized and integrated to ensure repeat offenders are tracked and there are visible behavioural changes among vehicle drivers