Unwilling to chase long paper trail, Gujarat police shun crime records bureau

Unwilling to chase long paper trail, Gujarat police shun crime records bureau
EXPRESS NEWS SERVICE

AHMEDABAD, SEPT 24: The Gujarat State Crime Records Bureau (SCRB) at Gandhinagar, which is supposed to assist police investigations by providing background information on criminals, does not even have the basic infrastructure to fulfill its role, thus hampering timely detection of cases.

Burdened with tasks that it is not meant to do, coupled with an acute staff shortage, the Records Bureau has just been gathering information about cases from police stations and passing it on to the National Bureau, New Delhi rather than working to create a database of criminals and their activities in the state.

Consequently, the failure of the SCRB has forced other departments of the police to make independent attempts by the police to gather information on criminals and their backgrounds.

``The SCRB provides any specific information that is asked by investigating police stations, but this is on paper and not on computer and hence takes time to be provided,'' said K S Das, SP of the SCRB.

This, despite the fact that computerisation of the SCRB began as early as 1987. Until recently, the SCRB used the UNIX system, and is only now in the process of a switch-over to a Windows-based system.

Citing a couple of examples in the city itself, an official said the city police was independently gathering information about criminals on an ``interrogation form.'' since the SCRB and modus operandi branch provided very little information that could be used to check and detect crime.

Similarly, the traffic police too, has been generating an independent database of vehicle owners along with their addresses, ``just to detect vehicle thefts,'' as an official put it. Similar attempts, like photographing of industrial labourers in Surat, have been undertaken by different district police too.

``We have to do it. It is inevitable because this information is not readily and adequately available from the state crime records and the modus operandi branches,'' opine police officers.

However, Das added that besides this, the agency has been involved in training cops from seven states in computer usage and the SCRB is also overseeing the implementation of the Crime Criminal Information System (CCIS), a uniform system of police detection procedures being introduced throughout the country by the National Crime Records Bureau.

The SCRB houses the Western Region training Institute (WRTI), where police personnel from seven states of the country are being familiarised with the computer and various applications. Policemen from Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Goa, Maharashtra, Jammu and Kashmir and Dadra and Nagar Haveli are being trained here for the past eight years.

The organisation is also overseeing the implementation of the Crime Criminal Information System (CCIS), a uniform criminal information system that has been devised by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).

The sole purpose of this system is to have all relevant information of criminals on computers in a format that is uniform for all police in the country. Ultimately (and that might take a considerable time), the idea is to reduce paper work to the bare minimum.

Apart from these two specialised functions that it has been engaged in, the SCRB has the routine job of collecting crime figures from all the districts in the state and forwarding these to the NCRB, which publishes ``Crime In India,'' an annual update of all criminal activity that takes place in the country.

But with just a staff of 50-odd persons, and having other jobs thrust upon it, the SCRB might just be finding it difficult to effectively do one important and crucial job of collecting and providing extensive data of criminals of all types.