Post the high-profile house-breaking incidents in Cuttack, the Commissionerate of Police is seriously mulling to do a crime-zone mapping of the twin cities. This it feels could go a long way in reining in the spiralling crime graph, especially burglaries, loots, gang-wars, rapes and other violent crimes in the twin city police limits area.
However, sources add that the Police Commissionerate had touched upon this idea some five - six years back, but had put it in cold storage following apprehensions and to some extent, lobbying by the real estate developers.
Crime-zone mapping would help the police in identifying the ‘crime spots’ and ‘striking hours’. Under this, the police would identify the police limit area to rate safety quotient of that area based on crime load. Besides mobilising resources for patrolling or increasing police visibility, there is a plan to keep the inhabitants informed about the safety aspects like structural interventions in their houses to address the ‘Target Hardening’ policing objective. Explaining
‘Target Hardening’, a senior police officer said increased police visibility along with proactive safeguards by public would make the ‘target’ of criminals ‘hard’.
However, what made realtors see red in crime-zone mapping is the fear that such a public mapping would crash the realty prices in the identified zones, he quipped.
He added that as per a pattern analysis on burglaries in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack, over 90 per cent occur in past midnight in the hours of 2 – 3 am and in most cases, including day-time incidents, the place of occurrences were very close to well connected arterial road networks like highways.
In police terminology, they are defined as ‘crime spots’ and ‘striking hours’, he observed. Significantly, what the Police Commissionerate is vouching for has already been operational in Ahmadabad as police there a few years back did so following a spate of daylight burglaries. The Ajmer police have also mapped crime zones by using Geographical Information System (GIS) technology, he informed.
Mapping would help police understand the origin of crime, crime carriers and their local handlers, the network it follows and even new gangs intruding in. The police would then clearly identify areas as per the nature of crime and could brief its officials about the way to operate in their areas.
Moreover, checks and balances would then also be introduced in areas reporting more burglaries or robberies. Besides, a local supervision network would be developed to get to the roots of crime, explained the senior police official.
He observed once the crime mapping exercise gets completed, supervision-cum-patrolling squads would then be formed for each police station. Universal patrolling is neither feasible nor a good policing, he added.
The mapping exercise will first see a geographical profiling with detail specifics about the area like residential or commercial, details of locals and their profession like number of businessmen/ high net worth individuals residing. Simultaneously, a database would also be prepared regarding history-sheeters and absconders area-wise, he explained.