THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Kerala Police have been tightening the screws on online child abuse and child pornography. A special wing was formed to deal with such cases and 28 people were booked for storing and disseminating child porn materials.
The state police could have done much better had they got effective backing from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) viz-a-viz data on the offence. The NCRB, which is entrusted with the task of collecting information on crime and criminals in the international level, had failed to forward the data regarding child pornography and online abuse pertaining to the state that was delivered to them by the Interpol.
Interpol’s International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children had sent eight million reports to NCRB last year of which about 1.08 lakh reports were meant for Kerala. Shockingly, none of the reports found its way to the Kerala Police. This year too, so far 2.4 million reports have been sent by Interpol to NCRB of which a large number of files have Kerala mention.
“Being a nodal agency to deal with the international bodies, we expected NCRB to act more sensibly. But they didn’t. The files concerning us landed with them and not a single one was sent to us. Had we got hold of the reports, it could have helped us act more swiftly and precisely against the offenders involved in heinous crimes like online sexual abuse and child pornography,” said a senior Kerala police officer.
Worried by this languid approach of NCRB, the Kerala Police have been contacting Interpol to make a different arrangement to share information with them. “We have been insisting for the last six months to make way for us to access the reports they have sent,” said police sources.
The push from the police’s side seems to have done the trick as Interpol recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the NCRB to facilitate the smooth transfer of data to the states concerned.
“We want to make sure our reports make it to Kerala,” Interpol’s Law Enforcement Training and Technology director (International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children) Guillermo Galarza had told the media here the other day. The NCRB is now expected to set up a system to share the reports provided by Interpol to the states on a real-time basis.