The Mumbai Police Crime Branch have started digitising all the dossiers that it has on criminal elements, and are feeding them into a centralised server.
Gautam Sandip Mengle
Mumbai Police sources said that the move is aimed at better maintenance of intelligence, which is one of the requirements for a better crackdown on criminal elements.
The Mumbai Police have already prepared lists of the 10 most wanted criminals in the jurisdiction of each police station and separate lists have also been drawn up of known criminals to be put under preventive arrest in light of the upcoming Assembly elections.
Earlier this month, the Crime Branch started entering all the data that it had on history-sheeters, both underworld affiliated and otherwise, into a dedicated storage server, based at the Crime Intelligence Unit (CIU), operations branch. The CIU-operations tracks known criminals and has extensive dossiers on all history sheeters, including their full names, known aliases, photographs, fingerprints, number of arrests, the kind of crimes that they have been accused of or convicted for, affiliations, if any, and known associates.
“Currently, the dossiers are in hard copy format, and as with all paperwork, there have been instances where looking for a particular dossier becomes difficult due to misplacement, damage or other issues. In some instances, the particular dossier is in the possession of an officer who happens to be on leave when the dossier is needed, leading to complications during the time of need. The idea is to have all the information easily accessible to all CIU personnel, whenever the need arises. It is important intelligence which needs to be maintained properly,” said Deputy Commissioner of Police (Detection) Dhananjay Kulkarni.
Officials added that after the dossiers are all fed into the servers, soft copies will be made and sent to all units of the Crime Branch as well as to all police stations in the city.
This way, there will be multiple copies and all police personnel will also have access to the dossiers whenever needed, instead of having to approach the CIU every time, said officials. “The police stations or Crime Branch units concerned can also keep a count of the criminal elements within their respective jurisdictions with the help of these dossiers,” said an officer.