The Mumbai police will soon be using a technology that will now help them in tracing vehicles involved in criminal cases, especially in terror cases. The city police will be armed with Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) technology. Once a suspected vehicle passes through the range of a camera having ANPR technology, the vehicle details will be saved in a central database of the police, which will help them gauge the movement of the suspected vehicle.
According to sources, cameras that are installed at critical points in the city will be enabled with the ANPR technology soon. This measure is being brought into effect to keep a check on terror and street crimes. Speaking about the ANPR technology, a traffic police officer said, “For example, any vehicle that passes through the radius of an ANPR camera, it’s registration number and photograph will be saved in the central database of the police department. So tomorrow, if we want to track a vehicle, we will simply put the number of the suspected vehicle in the database. If the database has captured the vehicle details then the ANPR technology will provide these details. This will give us an idea where the suspected vehicle has travelled and then we can look for some leads to pursue the case further. Moreover, the database details will also act as an evidence.”
After installing 4,700 CCTV cameras in the city to curb rash driving, traffic offenders, and accidents, the city traffic police department has recently asked the state government to install more cameras with high-end technology to keep track of vehicles for security reasons. Sudhir Kumar Shrivastava, Additional Chief Secretary (Home) said, “The ANPR cameras were already part of the plan. The CCTVs that are operational will have the ANPR technology as an added feature.”
