Digitization of crime investigation is the next best tech boom that Maharashtra Government is heading for. On Monday, state’s police announced the installation of cyber labs in 34 Police Commissioners. The basic deal is to manage the increasing menace of cyber crime and what better than the new technological equipment to fight against them. All in all it will be a tech reboot for police force.
Devendra Fadnavis, the Chief Minister of Maharashtra, said “Setting up of 34 cyber laboratories is just the beginning of the government’s efforts to crack down on rising cyber crime in the state. The number of labs will be increased to 51 by December this year. While we are trying hard to bring all of Mumbai under camera surveillance, having these labs will ensure that we have an upper hand in tackling crimes.
The government is already in the process of setting up a dedicated cyber police force and is training 1,000 personnel for this. This is a historical step to make our police force competent and on par with the best in the world.”
To his one police official added that, “This was only the first phase of the initiative to make the police force better equipped to deal with the forensic aspects of crime investigation and prevention.”
Brijesh Singh, the IGP of Cyber world stated, “When we were sizing up the project, we checked the needs of Police Commissionerates in the remotest corners of the state. We found that not only cyber crime cases, even general crimes need a lot of electronic evidence. It was also found that in nearly 50 per cent of cases, the investigation hits a roadblock due to factors like poor quality of CCTV footage, [difficulties in] data recovery from storage devices, and analysis of data. In the first phase, the cyber labs have been equipped with tools for technology assisted investigation.”
The second phase basically will deal in linking together of all labs to the cyber crime lab in the Ministry. This will enhance the overall process of cyber forensic investigation which includes CDR analysis, data recovery, image/video enhancement, tracking of IP addresses, examination of account details etc. A senior state police officer said that, “Technology assisted evidence will help with speedy investigation of cases and will also help get convictions.”
The police will also install tools to explore social media for potentially provocative content in order to terminate its existence from the source itself. This is one of the ways through which actions against the culprits will be taken at a better speed.
Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter etc will be sent requests by the cyber lab. An official said “Setting up a state Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) on the lines of the national CERT in Delhi is also on the cards.”
