Police to intensify surveillance through ‘third eye’ in city

Visakhapatnam : In order to meet their investigation needs, the city police have to depend largely on the CCTV cameras setup by the private sources rather than the surveillance system installed by district officials in Visakhapatnam city.

Currently, around 2,500 CCTV cameras are present in Visakhapatnam. Of them, over 50 per cent are non-functional.

In the past five years, the maintenance charges for the cameras were paid for a year. Later, due to lack of further maintenance, the functionality of the CCTV cameras gradually started decreasing.

After the formation of the alliance government, Home Minister Vangalapudi Anitha expressed shock over the condition of the CCTV cameras and their maintenance in the city. After conducting review meetings, the Home Minister directed the police personnel to focus on revamping the cameras for improved surveillance.

From detecting crime to monitoring traffic, CCTV cameras aid the police in investigating several cases and nabbing the offenders.

With many of the installed cameras failing to work, detecting cases has become a challenging task for the city police.

Even as control rooms are present at GVMC and police department to monitor and streamline traffic bottlenecks and other issues, the cameras installed at several signal points and busy junctions remain non-operational.

Apart from the police installing the CCTV cameras, the GVMC facilitated about 600 cameras in various points across the city.

As part of intensive awareness drives taken up by the police department, gated communities, apartment complexes and other commercial outlets were encouraged to set up CCTV cameras by the police

“In addition to creating awareness among people, we also cross check whether the cameras have been setup as assured by the residents welfare associations, those operating commercial units or not during our next visit. As many of the cameras remain non-functional in the city, the traffic police have to focus more on keeping tab of the violations and charging penalty on violators,” explained Shankha Brata Bagchi, City Commissioner of Police.

As police officials held review meetings with the GVMC officials, the Commissioner of Police said that assurance was given to the police by GVMC Commissioner P Sampath Kumar that the entire surveillance system will be revamped and made operational at the earliest.