After two Islamist bombings rocked the south-central Indian city of Hyderabad in 2013, officials rushed to install 5,000 surveillance cameras to increase security. There are now almost 700,000 in and around the metropolis.
The most striking symbol of the city’s rise as a surveillance hotspot is the shiny new Command and Control Center in the posh Banjara Hills neighborhood. The 20-story tower replaces a campus where swarms of officers already had access to 24-hour real-time CCTV and cell tower data geolocating reported crimes. The technology triggers every available camera in the area, opens a database of mug shots of criminals, and can pair images with facial recognition software to scan CCTV footage for known nearby criminals.
The Associated Press gained rare access to the operations earlier this year as part of an investigation into the proliferation of artificial intelligence tools used by law enforcement around the world.
Police Commissioner CV Anand said the new command center, inaugurated in August, encourages the use of technology in all government departments, not just the police. It cost $75 million (approximately Rs.6.2 million rupees) according to Mahender Reddy, director general of Telangana State Police.
Facial recognition and artificial intelligence have exploded in India in recent years, emerging as key law enforcement tools for policing large gatherings.
Police don’t just use technology to solve murders or catch armed robbers. Hyderabad was among the first local police forces in India to use a mobile application to hand out traffic fines and take photos of people flaunting mask mandates. Officers can also use facial recognition software to match images to a criminal database. Police officers have access to an app called TSCOP on their smartphones and tablets, which includes facial recognition scanning capabilities. The app also connects almost every police officer in the city with a variety of government and emergency services.
Anand said photos of traffic offenders and mask offenders are only kept long enough to ensure they are not needed in court and then deleted. He expressed surprise that any law-abiding citizen would object.
“If we have to control crime, we need surveillance,” he said.
However, questions remain about its accuracy, and a lawsuit has been filed challenging its legality. In January, a Hyderabad official scanned a reporter’s face to show how the facial recognition app worked. Within seconds, it returned five potential criminal matches in the nationwide database. Three were men.
Hyderabad has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on patrol vehicles, CCTV cameras, facial recognition and geotracking applications, and several hundred facial recognition cameras, among other things, Anand said. The investment has helped the state attract more private and foreign investment, he said, including Apple’s development center, which was inaugurated in 2016; and a main compartment Microsoft Data center announced in March.
“When these companies decide to invest in a city, they first look at the legal situation,” Anand said.
He credited technology with a rapid decline in crime. Jewelry theft, for example, has dropped from 1,033 incidents a year to fewer than 50 a year after the use of cameras and other technology, he said.
Hyderabad’s trajectory coincides with that of the nation. The country’s National Crime Records Bureau is trying to build one of the largest facial recognition systems in the world.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are steadily building on previous government efforts, capitalizing on the rise of surveillance technology since taking office in 2014. His flagship Digital India campaign aims to overhaul the country’s digital infrastructure, to govern using information technology.
The government has promoted smart policing through drones, AI-enabled surveillance cameras and facial recognition. It’s a blueprint that has garnered support across the political spectrum and has seeped into states across India, said Apar Gupta, executive director of the New Delhi-based Internet Freedom Foundation.
“There’s also a lot of social and civic support for it — people don’t always fully understand that,” Gupta said. “They see technology and think this is the answer.”
