Fighting crime

The idea of meeting Dr Umar Saif, chairman Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB), can be unsettling given his impeccable academic credentials having attended the best of the best, Cambridge and MIT. Not to mention his repute for an intimidating work ethic and a fierce delivery orientation. And then you actually meet him only to be bowled over by his eloquence, disarming humility and cracking wit. At PITB, he has overseen some dramatic IT interventions in Punjab in the realms of health, education and most importantly law and order, all aimed at improving public service delivery, transparency and accountability.

As Punjab, under the leadership of Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif, races to embrace technology, other provinces look with great interest at the PITB initiatives to improve governance. Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah recently visited PITB to take a closer look at the use of IT especially in the realm of law and order. Being a Stanford graduate, another world class institution, he is no stranger himself to the use of technology in improving service delivery. He showed great interest in some of the flagship PITB initiatives for implementation in Sindh to combat terrorism and crime. Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif graciously assured him of his full support and work in this regard is already underway.

The Sindh chief minister was particularly impressed by the use of IT by the Punjab police. Punjab has made remarkable progress on this count by employing technology to verify the identities of people, map crime patterns and track criminal movement. The entry points in Lahore are manned by police barriers armed with portable biometric devices connected through GPRS to a massive databank integrating multiple criminal databases such as the Criminal Record Office (CRO), Redbook, Blackbook and 4^th Scheduler with extensive records of suspects/convicts involved in terrorism and sectarian violence. Fingerprints are scanned and checked for any criminal record before entry is granted.

Studies confirm that a large percentage of crimes can be prevented by effective surveillance and tracking of known criminals. CROs have been established in all 36 districts of Punjab and are connected to a central criminal database. This has resulted in dozens of criminals being caught by digitally matching the fingerprints from the crime scene with the digitised CRO database. Digitisation of the CRO is part of a larger effort to develop an integrated criminal profiling system. This new profiling system combines data from CNIC, CRO, call data records, vehicle ownership records, land ownership data, driving licence, arms licence, urban property tax information, tenant information, hotel check-ins and prisoner data to enhance the surveillance and investigation capability of law-enforcement agencies. The system will in due course also include data from Police Beat Books, the traditional surveillance registers maintained by the police.

Similarly, a crime mapping system has been put in place in four districts in Punjab — Sargodha, Faisalabad, Vehari and Lahore. Each instance of crime reported in the system is also geo-tagged by the investigating officer through an Android phone application. Modelled after the NYPD’s CompStat system, over 173,000 crime incidences have been geo-tagged to date. Geo-tagged crime data enables the police to do spatial analysis of the crime trends and plan police patrols and check posts accordingly. A key IT intervention revolves around the development of a computerised data management system for the police. The primary purpose of this system is to digitise all police records (26 registers) maintained at the thana level to speed up lengthy investigation processes and provide efficient resolution to citizen complaints. Currently this system is fully functional in 228 police stations in Punjab, and over 160,000 FIRs have been registered in it. The system will be rolled out in all 709 police stations in Punjab in the next few months.

The Punjab Police recently arrested 43 criminals at hotels of Lahore using the ‘Hotel Eye Software’ developed by PITB. It is the first IT initiative introduced in hotels to keep an eye on the activities of criminals, suspects and terrorists. The software now links 500 hotels with the crime database in the DIG Operations office. The software allows hotels to digitally record and share the details of their visitors with the police. Earlier, hotels recorded the details of their guests in registers manually but are now bound under the National Action Plan (NAP) to record every visitor or guest in the newly-installed system.

Punjab under Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif is taking huge strides in employing technology to improve service delivery in multiple areas of public concern including health and education. PITB under Dr Umar Saif remains the pivot of this paradigm shift centered on tailored tech interventions to disrupt and overturn the status quo.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 13^th, 2016.

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