From Bengaluru traffic to drugs to technology and cybercrimes, Karnataka’s state police chief, Director General & Inspector General of Police, Praveen Sood, visited the The New Sunday Express office and interacted with the editors and staff. In an informal but involved interaction, Sood spoke of the importance of technology, issues related to crime and solving crimes, and being alert in evading cyber crime attacks using various methods. Excerpts:
What is the significance of posting a special commissioner for traffic in Bengaluru?
Traffic is the baby of multiple civic agencies, but it’s the police who have to manage it. Posting a special commissioner of the rank of ADGP was the idea of the chief minister, who wants to see changes. The officer is here to expedite that change and make it happen faster, but there are serious coordination issues. Other agencies have to do a lot. We need more infrastructure. We need a longer Metro. We need better routes. We need good roads. And we need a very robust parking infrastructure which is missing in the city. We are bringing in technology for automation and enforcement. Posting a special commissioner and also a joint commissioner is to bring a mix of experience and youth to tackle this change.
The police are catching motorists, and there are allegations of harassment …
Nowhere in the world do policemen monitor a traffic signal. But we expect traffic policemen to stand at the signal and stop them physically. Red means stop, whether a policeman is standing there or not. But, I have issued orders not to stop vehicles just to check documents, as it may be harassment for motorists who have all valid documents. Such small things damage the reputation of the police.
How has technology been beneficial to both the public and police?
It’s changed a lot, especially in the last 4-5 years. We have leveraged technology in a big way. We have introduced citizen-centric technology. People should not be made to come to the police station to do routine work which can be done without going there. We have made police verification and police reports on lost articles/documents completely online. Recently, we introduced a system where people can file a complaint for stolen/lost vehicles and get the FIR copy for insurance. These initiatives have saved a lot of time both for the public and also the police. In future, we will bring in a system where we can even submit a chargesheet to the court online.
What measures have been put in place to keep the recruitment process clean in the wake of the scam in the recent PSI recruitment?
We have learnt a lesson. In 2002, Karnataka was the first to start the most transparent and objective recruitment system and for 10-15 years, it was only improving because there was zero human intervention because of technology. Technology is as efficient and honest as the person sitting on it. If the custodian of technology gets compromised, then no technology can help and this is where we failed. So, we have set that right and we will be more careful in future. The good thing is we have the lowest number of vacancies. It’s about 12% of which 7% is advertised and at the end of this recruitment, we will have a vacancy of about 5%, that is about 5,000 people. I have been seeing it for 20 years and never the vacancy position has gone below 25,000.
Since we were talking about technology, and we are in the cyber capital, how well-trained is our police force to address challenges posed by cyber crimes?
Cyber crime is not a new challenge for Bengaluru, but you can never be fully good because every day a new method of cyber crime develops. People, who are PhDs, are developing new modus operandi every day. So we are equipped but we are always behind because new things keep coming. Secondly, the volume is increasing. We have nine cyber crime police stations in Bengaluru, one in CID and one each in every district. No other state in the country has so many cybercrime police stations. But, no one can be ever fully-equipped because this is a work in progress. We also keep sensitising people. The best solution or the long-lasting solution is more awareness. Why do people fall prey to cybercrime? Two reasons: One is ignorance; the second, which you will not like to hear, nine out of 10 cyber crimes happen because of greed. Why would anyone give you a free holiday or send a courier that you have not even ordered? How will you win a lottery when you haven’t purchased one? And that modus operandi to tap greed is changing every day. So all we need is to learn.
But one area where we have become leaders in this country is forensic science. We were in an age when we had one big forensic lab in Bengaluru and a few regional labs outside. The waiting period for getting an FSL report for DNA and cybercrime etc, was three years and other results required six months. Today, it’s one month for all other cases and that three years has come down to 6-12 months. We have invested in three areas of forensic science, and one is manpower. We had about 60-70 scientific officers and today we are 300, who are civilians. We have created something which is a first in the country, called Scene of Crime Officers (SOCOs), who play a crucial role in crime investigation.
They are trained at the National Forensic Sciences University (NFSU), Gandhinagar (Gujarat). Also, we have spent roughly Rs 70 crore in the last two years on high-tech equipment. In the next one month, I’m going to issue an order that every scene of a heinous crime, which is punishable with seven years and more, should be visited mandatorily by SOCOs so our investigation migrates to investigation rather than getting witness statements. Trials take years, and while witnesses may go hostile, scientific evidence never goes hostile. We were able to submit chargesheets in two rape-and-murder cases involving children, in nine days in one and 14 in the other because of these changes. In 10-20 years, 30% of the people who will do police investigations will be civilians. So we need to create more students coming to forensic science and for that NFSU has offered to open their campus in Karnataka.
There’s a lot of research done in theoretical sciences and mathematics around crime. How helpful is that?
It is extremely helpful because problems are too many and resources are limited. Today, thanks to technology, every crime gets plotted, with latitude and longitude and actually, you can see which areas you have problems with. These are called predictive policing models that can help you in planning your policing and optimising your resources which are scarce. There is a technology with us where you can correlate phone calls to 112 with crime prone locations. Now, you will say where do you use that? We use them for placing Hoysala vehicles strategically to reduce our response time.
Tell us about one aspect which you really want to focus on …
We need to create a lot of infrastructure. It’s easy for me to order that all policemen must be very nice to people when they come to the station, but he also has a right to ask me about the condition of places where they work and live. A policeman today is unfortunately or fortunately overqualified and we expect them to be experts in investigating terrorism, and cybercrimes and tell you should be nice to people. He also expects us to give him a good police station to work in. Some stations are really bad and it’s inhuman to ask anyone to work there. We are working on it and creating better workplaces for the police, which not only policemen will be proud of, but citizens entering these buildings will have some confidence. Earlier, there was no provision for separate washrooms for women in stations. Now, all stations will have them. Housing facilities for our staff also need to improve, and we are constructing 10,000 houses.
How big are the challenges posed by the drug menace and the dark web?
It’s a very big challenge, as big as cybercrime, because the methods have changed. Earlier people would order through SMS or WhatsApp or telephone calls. Now no one uses them. They will either use social media with code words or the dark web, which we have been able to penetrate. But have we penetrated the whole thing? No. So it’s a big challenge. Again, technology matters here. We are equipped today for testing (narcotics) quickly which used to take three years earlier. But are we catching everyone? No, to be truthful. There will be much more than we are catching. And, it’s an endless fight. In cyber and drugs, people will invent new ways of indulging in them and we have to keep updating ourselves. But it is a mess.
How difficult is the life of a policeman in the times of social media?
Extremely difficult. Social media is akin to a platform where people can abuse and scoot. When I joined the service, no one used to get hurt so easily but now everyone gets hurt. And when they get hurt, they run to the police stations and the courts. So life has become very, very difficult. Let us accept that if you are on social media, you will also learn to live with all that garbage which exists in social media. There is fake news, dedicated wrong news, motivated news, character-insinuating news and all those things. To presume that police will be active on everything that is on social media is difficult. It’s not practical. Yes, we do take action when there is a threat to national security or safety, or it’s a law and order situation. But we need to tread cautiously on things that are on social media, where most things are untrue.
Whenever there is an incident, then we talk about intelligence gathering and also there was a proposal to recruit exclusively for the intelligence wing. How is it going?
It’s excellent and this experiment has succeeded not only in intelligence but in CID too. The idea was these specialised organisations like CID and Intelligence have to be a mix of experience and continuity. So, some officers come for a year or two and go back to the field, but there have to be some officers who are there for 35 years. So, we have some detective sub-inspectors in CID who will become detective inspectors and detective SPs, who stay there all their life while others come and go. Similarly, in Intelligence, we have officers who are recruited as intelligence officers who stay for 35 years and others come and go. This is exactly what happens in the Intelligence Bureau or CBI. It has proven to be very successful.
What are the challenges in the upcoming Assembly elections considering the developments in the state?
We are geared up. As I said, the biggest challenge is social media. We are geared up to handle the things on the field, we are trained to handle that, but now most of the war happens on social media. I won’t say we are not geared to handle that, but to what extent can you go? Can you dedicate all your resources to what A said to B and B said to A? It’s like losing the woods for the trees. We are geared up but the challenges are very big.
After so many years of serving, do you think people are interested in joining the police force?
Historically, policing has never been the first career choice for most. But things are changing. I will give you an example. We have advertised for 4,000-plus Armed Police Constable posts and we have received over three lakh applications. It’s still not closed. So a large number of people want to join the police force, but a lot of them leave when they get a school teacher’s job. They prefer to go as a school teacher or as a clerk because of the holidays and the leisure time. Police jobs at every level are very challenging and demanding. But at a higher level, it has become a more sought-after profession. The heartening thing is more and more women are joining. Today, 25% of the IPS trainees are women, but when I joined there were only two out of 110. The same is happening in the state at the middle and lower level. Now, it is open for transgenders too and we have tried to make it neutral.
What about you? Did you always want to be in the police?
I’m an accidental police officer. I did not know what IPS was before I joined. When we were children, we are vintage models now, there was no career guidance. The parents knew only two things, doctor or engineer. Otherwise, you’re useless. So I thought I would become a doctor but went to engineering and did it. And then somebody said there is something called civil services. I appeared and I got selected. But no regrets, neither joining the police nor coming to Karnataka, because whatever people may say about the police, I know that the kind of good things an average policeman does in his lifetime is unimaginable. The only thing is people or the media don’t talk about them. They only talk when policemen fail. They don’t talk when policemen do thousands of good things. So having known that, no regret that I joined the police force.