Data analytics is undoubtedly improving every aspect of countries’ discipline. In Pakistan, we witness data analytics in the latest governance, telecommunication, and educational initiatives. Not lagging behind any of these, the law enforcement agencies in Pakistan have actively worked on what’s called Crime Analytics, to combat crimes in a robust manner.
Recent PITB’s Crime Analytics initiative hasn’t been talked about much in public, but the perspective of police officials has surfaced in the media offering insights into the law enforcement crime analytics. This article compiles the technology and perspective behind the Crime Analytics in Pakistan.
Participating in the discourse, a police officer recently took to Dawn to highlight the importance and need for an advanced analytics platform for Pakistan police. PSP Maria Taimor considers this as a further step in combating crimes by moving towards predictive and prevention policing.
Crime Mapping Software are functional in Pakistan Police
Crime mapping systems use location information of crime events to detect spatial patterns in criminal activity. Statistical methods are used to analyze location-based historical data and find patterns and trends. These patterns and trends carry information such as key areas used for crimes in the past. Police investigators trace criminals in ongoing cases with this knowledge.
Spatial Crime Analytics: According to criminology, a crime is not a random event. It will occur based on some psychological, economic, and social factors connected with the criminal. Based on this, spatial patterns can suggest important information on crimes and inform police decisions.
Another interesting aspect of spatial crime analytics is that it considers the 80/20 rule. This rule states that 80% of crimes happen in 20% of areas. Crime mapping offers police to focus on these 20% of areas by analyzing historical places of crime events.
A Say from a Police Officer: PSP Maria Taimur writes an article about use of Crime Analytics in Pakistan and how they can be further enhanced to inform preventive and predictive policing. This requires crime mapping to move past the solo GIS data- Geographic Information System, to incorporate further information regarding the crime. In terms of policing, this is called a problem oriented policing solution.
In such a solution, the focus is on collecting data on the root problem and taking measures to prevent future crimes. This data comes from community members, media and journalists, and other third parties. Such bodies could provide important information on what lifestyle perpetrators led, where they resided, and which people they met.
This additional information, such as from community watch commeties, could be integrated with spatial patterns to allow a cross-sectional analysis of the crime. Moreover, the historical data could also be used for predictive analysis and in planning prevention measures beforehand to minimize criminal damage.
Hotel Eye Software is installed all over country
Inspector general of Pakistan police Rao Sardar Ali Khan in a December 2021 interview says that most criminals stayed in hotels before and after committing criminal activity. On this basis, Pakistan police have made it mandatory for every hotel and rest house owner to install and use Hotel Eye Application.
” Pakistan police uses data analytics for three goals: improve policing, make the country safe, and win the trust of people “
Hotel Eye: This application is a real-time monitoring mechanism that logs check-in and check-out at hotels and rest houses. Hotel Eye records personal identity information of visitors and aims to identify those with previous criminal records. The database of the software is integrated with national database- NADRA, and police database- PSRMS.
Impact: As from this, the Hotel eye software has helped police in arresting 70 criminals since Oct 2017. Today, as of PITB’s latest update, almost 600 hotels have been registered under Hotel Eye in Punjab with more than 1.2 million check-ins recorded of which 5,723 criminal record holders were traced.
Prior to this data platform, hotel owners sent weekly paper work of visitor records to police who then manually analyzed the data to identify suspects.
Crime Analytics: Following the data analytics principles, Hotel Eye could play an important role in providing key data that could then be used to find trends, and answer questions leading the police towards informed strategic planning as well as prevention policing.
For example, if there’s a pattern of data that describes ‘criminals staying at hotels during spring season of the year’, this information could be used to deploy policing resources around those areas and keep a close eye on the criminals.
Similar to the Hotel Eye system, Pakistan police have introduced Digital Tenant registration to cover criminals in rented buildings and property. Another example comes from the Safe City project, which is one of its kind in Traffic Monitoring and Control Policing.
To Sum up
Crime Analytics offers Pakistan Police a modern way of dealing with crimes – collecting and processing criminal data to find useful patterns and trends that guide policing strategies and decision making. It has proven as an effective way of enabling policing professionalism, efficiency, and effectiveness in responding to crimes.
