After some of Islamist bombings rock the south-central Indian city of Hyderabad in 2013, officials rush to install 5,000 CCTV cameras to bolster security. Now there are nearly 700,000 CCTV cameras in and around Hyderabad.
The striking symbol of the city’s rise as a surveillance hotspot is the gleaming new Command and Control Center in the Banjara Hills neighbourhood.
The 20-story tower replaces a campus where swarms of officers already had access to 24-hour, real-time CCTV and cell phone tower data that geolocates reported crimes.
The technology triggers any available camera in the area, pops up a mugshot database of criminals and can pair images with facial recognition software to scan CCTV footage for known criminals.
The Associated Press was given rare access to the operations earlier 2022 as part of an investigation into the proliferation of artificial intelligence tools use by law enforcement around the world.
Police Commissioner C V Anand said the new command centre, inaugurate in August 2022, encourages using technologies across government departments, not just police.
It cost $75 million (approx. Rs. 620 crore), according to Mahender Reddy, director general of the Telangana State Police.
Facial recognition and artificial intelligence have explode in India in recent years, becoming key law enforcement tools for monitoring big gatherings.
Police aren’t just using technology to solve murders or catch armed robbers.
Hyderabad was among the first local police forces in India to use a mobile application to dole out traffic fines and take pictures of people flaunting mask mandates.
Officers also can use facial recognition software to scan pictures against a criminal database.
Police officers have access to an app, call as TSCOP, on their smartphones and tablets that includes facial recognition scanning capabilities.
The app also connects almost all police officers in the city to a host of government and emergency services.
C V Anand said photos of traffic violators and mask-mandate offenders are kept only long enough to be sure they aren’t need in court and are then expunge.
He expressed surprise that any law-abiding citizen would object.
C V Anand Said :
“If we need to control crime, we need to have surveillance,”.
As questions linger over the accuracy and a lawsuit has file challenging its legality.
In January, a Hyderabad official scan a female reporter’s face to show how the facial recognition app worked.
Within seconds, it return five potential matches to criminals in the statewide database.
Three were men.
Hyderabad has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on patrol vehicles, CCTV cameras, facial recognition and geo-tracking applications and several hundred facial recognition cameras, among many other technologies, C V Anand said.
The investment has help the state attract more private and foreign investment, C V Anand said, including Apple’s development centre, inaugurate in 2016; and a major Microsoft data centre announce in March.
C V Anand Said :
“When these companies decide to invest in a city, they first look at the law-and-order situation,”.
He credited technology for a rapid decrease in crime.
Hyderabad’s trajectory is in line with the nation’s.
The country’s National Crime Records Bureau is seeking to build what could be among the world’s largest facial recognition systems.
Building steadily on previous government efforts, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have seize on the rise in surveillance technology since coming to power in 2014.
His flagship Digital India campaign aims to overhaul the country’s digital infrastructure to govern using information technology.
Government has promote smart policing through drones, AI-enable CCTV cameras and facial recognition.
It’s a blueprint that has garner support across the political spectrum and seeped into states across India, said Apar Gupta, executive director of the New Delhi-based Internet Freedom Foundation.
Apar Gupta Said :
“There is a lot of social and civic support for it too – people don’t always fully understand,”.
“They see technology and think this is the answer.”
