THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The police department has decided to wind up the GIS (Geographic Information System) crime mapping project rolled out eight years back. The project was set in motion to prepare crime hotspots and for intelligence analysis. But various reasons, including technical issues and system incompatibility, have led to the decision to drop it by next year. Headquarters ADGP Manoj Abraham said the project will cease to function as a separate programme and will instead be integrated with the Emergency Response Support System (ERSS) brought out by the Ministry of Home Affairs.
“The GIS crime mapping project had two main components -- vehicle tracking and crime hotspot mapping. The ERSS covers these two aspects apart from 10 more components. The GIS crime mapping has become technologically redundant. Hence, it will be migrated to ERSS,” he said. Meanwhile, insiders said the GIS crime mapping project came a cropper and failed to serve the force. The technical service for the project, which cost about Rs 10 crore, was provided by Keltron.
“There is no standard operating procedure (SOP) on how to operate the GIS project. Most of the crimes are not entered into the system. No analysis was possible because of that. For intelligence analysis, a special CRISP tool was purchased by spending more than `1 crore. However, it failed to deliver,” sources said. Further, the inefficacy of the system is learnt to have become obvious when a Dubai-based tech team visited the state to implement a project. “They wanted to implement a project that was similar to the one being run by Dubai police. For that, they wanted historical data that should have been made available using the GIS mapping project. But the system failed to fetch data and Dubai project had to be cancelled,” sources added.