KARACHI: Police authorities have shelved their plan to outsource city’s video surveillance through the command and control centres after the Supreme Court order for the development of an effective system, as the network of existing two-megapixel cameras was found incapable of properly identifying suspects, it emerged on Monday.

Officials privy to the recent development at the Central Police Office (CPO) said the police high-ups decided last week to “cancel” a tender that had been issued in July. Through the tender the authorities had invited companies with expertise in the particular technology for “operation, maintenance and connectivity of command and control centres of Sindh police, KMC [Karachi Metropolitan Corporation] and traffic”.

“That plan has now been cancelled,” said an official.

“The Supreme Court has ordered [the police] to develop an effective video surveillance system in Karachi after it emerged during recent hearings in connection with the Karachi law and order suo motu implementation case that the existing system fails to help the police in identifying suspects in footage.

“Hence, the plan to hand it over the existing system to some private party for operation will be a kind of waste of money,” he said.

However, he added, the Sindh police had requested the Supreme Court to allow the force to maintain and operate the existing infrastructure of CCTV cameras until a better system was developed by the government. The competent authority recently approved Rs10 billion for this purpose.

“Now the current position is that the Sindh police have to develop a new video surveillance system in accordance with the Supreme Court order, as the government has already given the funds,” he said.

But the Sindh police believed that the new surveillance system would take at least nine months to be in place. It was for this reason that they requested the apex court to allow them to use the existing cameras till the new system was developed, he added.

The court annoyance over poor quality CCTV cameras and order to replace them with the latest ones allowed the police to take the major decision of replacing the existing 2,200 cameras across Karachi with the ones having 12 megapixel definition.

Besides police’s own surveillance system set up at the Command and Control Centre of CPO, the police authorities have also been supervising KMC’s

system at Civic Centre since September 2013 and the one developed by the Sindh Information Technology Ministry for traffic police department.

Envisaged by former Karachi nazim Syed Mustafa Kamal, the then city government had formally launched its command and control system in June 2008, that initially allowed surveillance of two signal-free corridors — Sharea Faisal to SITE and Surjani Town. The Sindh police had launched the ‘video surveillance system’ for Karachi in 2010 with an initial estimated cost of Rs500 million. Currently they operated 1,000 CCTV cameras across the city.

“Over the years, the technology has advanced at a much faster pace and choice of equipment availability has increased manifolds,” said the official.

“It’s high time we enhanced technological support for effective policing on the pattern of many developed cities of the world. The plan to replace the two megapixel cameras with at least 10 megapixel ones and increase the number of locations is a step in the same direction.”

Published in Dawn, August 16th, 2016

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