THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Varying their focus depending on the hour of night, state police have introduced a time-specific patrolling strategy that has at its core intelligence-led law enforcement to tackle crimes. Under new guidelines, patrol teams will monitor bars, cinema halls and transport hubs in the early hours of nightfall before turning their focus to burglary prone areas, locked houses, women’s hostels and senior citizens’ homes after midnight.
Teams have been directed to follow a mandatory checklist that includes GPS-based location check-ins, hourly reporting to control rooms, facial recognition scans of suspects using the Mobile Integrated Core Policing System (miCoPS) application, visits to locked houses and senior citizens living alone, and vehicle and sobriety checks at important junctions.
In emergencies, reserve patrol teams will be identified through an artificial intelligence (AI)-based nearest-vehicle-identification system and dispatched to the spot. Police command centres have been directed to collect and compile details of night checks and submit them to the district police chiefs concerned at 8am every day.
The order issued by law and order ADGP P Vijayan has directed district police chiefs to implement the protocol immediately. The guidelines also mandate DPCs to ascertain monthly district-level combing operations, DIGs to ensure bi-monthly range-level exercises and IGs to assure quarterly zonal-level exercises to strengthen preventive policing. Compliance reports will be reviewed on August 4.
Night operations have been divided into four phases with a separate focus for each. Between 8pm and 10pm, patrol teams will focus on bars, late-night cinema halls, bus stands, railway stations and other crowded locations where public movement remains high.
From 10pm to 1am, the priority will be drunken driving checks near bars, malls, eateries and highways. Officers will also patrol temple festivals, major junctions and other public gathering places.
Between 1am and 4am, the focus will shift to burglary prevention. Teams have been directed to cover burglary-prone areas, locked houses, women’s hostels, beaches, religious institutions, banks, ATMs and other vulnerable locations. They will also verify the presence of known offenders.
From 4am to 6am, patrols will concentrate on senior citizens living alone, financial institutions, transport hubs and border check posts.
Tech-based strategy
The guidelines also introduce technology-based monitoring of patrolling. Control rooms will maintain live dashboards displaying the location of patrol vehicles, route deviations, facial recognition alerts and the status of checks.
