HYDERABAD: Big Data plays a crucial role in Hyderabad police in nabbing criminals. However, how do they use it? Firstly Big Data, as the name suggests are extremely large data sets that have to be analysed to reveal certain patterns and trends.
According to sources, as of now, police use Big Data such as records of call data, criminal records, fingerprints, and high-end CCTV cameras to analyse crimes. Although, call data records are Big Data when the quantity of the records is high.
Secondly, criminal records is another huge data set which remains extremely useful for maintaining law and order in the future. As of now, the police is in the process of digitising records from the early 2000s. Similarly, fingerprints are also important for the police in identifying suspects or repeat offenders. The analysis of fingerprints has become much easier ever since they have been digitised.
Lastly, camera footage, especially CCTV footage, have a huge role to play in policing activities. There are three different categories of CCTV footage received and stored by the city police — police cameras which are of high quality and can capture high definition images, community CCTV footage which collected from a CCTV camera installed by a residents of a locality, and Nenu Saitham, where the camera is set up by an individual.
To analyse such huge troves of data, a large number of personnel are required. The same was evident in the Nizam Museum theft case, where the police admitted to having scanned hundreds of CCTV cameras to identify the culprit after it cracked the case.
More importantly, the high definition police cameras are also equipped to detect a person with a criminal record. The technology is advanced enough to detect a face even amid a crowd, and then cross-reference it with the criminal records.
In the future, a segment of the police will be looking towards Big Data to detect economic offences that go beyond Rs 10 lakh, sources said.