PESHAWAR: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa police department has digitised over 1.43 million copies of first information reports from across the province during the last nine years in a bid to benefit from the information technology to fight crimes, officials said.

Officials told Dawn that the police department had set up a central database to store records of FIRs registered by police stations throughout the province.

“We have so far registered over 1.4 million FIRs and that the designated officers of police stations, posts and checkpoints can check the database with the help of a text message from cellphones,” an official said.

He said the police department was focusing on turning itself into high-tech force and had taken several initiatives to promote electronic and smart policing to respond to crimes in a swift and better manner.

The official said the officers could check the database for any suspect nominated in a FIR in any police station of the province by a text containing his national identity card number, name, father’s name and address.

He said if there was an FIR registered against the suspect in any part of the province, the officials would receive a text message within 30 seconds containing the crime and related details.

The official said the police department was making a digital copy of every FIR registered in any part of the province to store it on the system.

“Since every police station doesn’t have facilities to scan and upload the documents directly to the database, all police stations share FIRs with the district police officers before they’re stored in the system,” he said.

The official said the department was also linking that system to the criminal record verification system, which had digitised fingerprints, pictures and other documents of over 9,000 people, who had so far been jailed.

He said work was under way on connecting the police system with the Nadra database, which would allow them to use fingerprints to fight crimes.

“The efforts to introduce technology-driven policing helped us arrest 1,819 wanted accused in the province,” he said.

The statistics showed that Peshawar district is leading the way in the digitisation drive by storing 269,789 FIRs into the database from Jan 2009 to Sept 30, 2018.

As for others districts, Mardan registered 122,973 FIRs in the period, Charsadda 79,399, Nowshera 57,617, Swabi 66,149, Swat 107,253, Buner 67,190, Shangla 24,686, Lower Dir 91,287, Upper Dir 34,858, Chitral 33,683, Abbottabad 66,105, Haripur 46,066, Mansehra 59,017, Battagram 14,588, Lower Kohistan 5,974, Upper Kohistan 6,398, Torghar 1,651, Kohat 62,081, Hangu 25,897, Karak 29,330, Bannu 60,317, Lakki Marwat 31,766, Dera Ismail Khan 55,964 and Tank 16,272.

Published in Dawn, October 7th, 2018