Kolkata Police Developing Mobile App to Trace Criminals with past Records

Kolkata Police are all set to launch a mobile application that will make it easy for investigating officers to immediately get hold of past records of criminals. The Deputy Commissioner (south suburban division) Santosh Pandey is leading a team of policemen with dedicated IT and forensic experts to develop the app.

The app will likely be called M-Watch or Mobile Watch.

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Currently, if the police receive any details about physical attributes, features or mannerism of a suspect from the crime spot or the description of victims, they need to refer to the central database at Lalbazar or the divisional headquarters to find a match.

“This invariably leads to a huge loss of time. For the new app, extensive information on men and women already arrested, including details of their physical appearances, languages spoken by them, their area of operation and even the manner in which they conducted themselves during a crime, will be regularly fed into the system,” Santosh Pandey told The Times of India.

After getting details about the accused from the victim or witnesses, the investigating officer can log in with his/her ID using a smartphone and scan all possible suspects without any delay.

The app will be so accurate that even a description of the colour of the criminal’s eyes, or of the dialect in which the criminal speaks, will be enough to look for probable matches.

While new criminals cannot be covered under this app, it will be very useful for tracing suspects with past records. As of now, the team is concentrating on feeding maximum information of the background of criminals into the app, which is in trial phase.

The team is also trying to conduct test runs to solve two robbery cases. All investigating officers in the city will be able to download the app on their phones after the trial runs. With further development, the team is also planning to introduce biometric features. To match fingerprints, the investigating officer will just need to have the suspect place his/her fingertips on the rectangular scanner and the software will look into the national database to inform if there is a match. Additionally, the officer can take a photo of the suspect and the system will analyse about 130 points on the face, such as the distance between the eyes and nose, and scan the national database for matches.

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