Andhra Pradesh police crack 253 cases using AI CCTV360 System

Vijayawada: A six-month-old boy was kidnapped in Chirala of Bapatla district. Police traced the boy within 24 hours at Tanguturu and apprehended the kidnappers. Similarly, two 11-year-old girls from Guntur ran away from home after parents reprimanded them for using social media on mobile phones.

They were also traced within hours of lodging the complaint at Machilipatnam in Krishna district, thanks to the new AI-powered CCTV360 system developed by the Andhra Pradesh police.The system is the brainchild of chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu. He proposed it back in 2017 during his earlier term, but it had not materialised at that time. After taking over as the chief minister again in 2024, he revived the plan of having an integrated smart surveillance system that can be utilised for various tasks.The state govt installed more than 15,000 cameras across the state at strategic locations. Out of the total cameras, 1,000 of them are powered with facial recognition system (FRS) and more than 4,500 of them are automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras. All these cameras are now connected to the Real Time Governance Society (RTGS) centre.The unique feature of CCTV360 is that all the station house officers (SHOs) have been given access to the system through a mobile app.

If the SHOs have the photographs of the fugitives, they can flag on the system and the FRS cameras across the state will continuously keep scanning for the wanted persons.Whenever a camera finds a fugitive, it will send an automatic alert to the officer who raised the flag and also the local SHO where the person was traced. The cameras will keep running the analytics in the background without any manual intervention. Once it gives an alert, police know where to look for them, said Malika Garg, an IPS officer posted as joint secretary in RTGS for this project.The state govt started deploying the system in March and by the end of April, it was fully operational. Since its launch, police cracked 253 cases with the help of this system, including missing persons, tracing stolen vehicles, and finding fugitives in high-impact cases.“The uniqueness of the project is that we built systems that can talk to each other and make it inclusive by giving access to ground-level officers.

Though we have control rooms and command control centres at district level, it was very difficult for the police in one district to trace a person or stolen vehicle in another district. Now the entire state has been brought under one umbrella and the SHOs can access the data at their fingertips”, said Malika Garg.The results are very encouraging so far, she said adding that they are further improving it by adding additional features like automatic crowd detection and abandoned suspicious objects.GFX:15,000: cameras installed across the state10,000: Cameras having either ANPR or FRSReach: 1,426+ field-level officers — station house officers and investigating officers253: cases cracked using CCTV360 between March and JulyBy case type:missing-person cases: 38% (95 cases)stolen vehicle recoveries: 40% (101 cases)Other cases: property offences, hit-and-run cases,wanted-accused apprehensions, and more serious crime — including chain-snatching, extortion, narcotics interdiction, and cases of attempted murder and murder.In 45% of these cases, the vehicle, suspect, or missing person crossed either district or state boundaries.Some high-impact cases detected:Kidnapped infant rescued: A 6-month-old baby abducted in Chirala was traced through ANPR-based vehicle tracking and rescued within 13 hours; the accused was arrested.Minor girl recovered: A missing minor from East Godavari was traced across districts using facial recognition and vehicle analytics, leading to her rescue and the arrest of a repeat offender.Missing teenager found: A 16-year-old girl missing from Bapatla district was located at a railway station within 14 hours after her photograph was uploaded to the facial recognition system.Interstate fugitive arrested: Police tracked a suspect wanted in a case registered in Karnataka through Andhra Pradesh’s ANPR network and arrested him in under six hours.Two-year-old missing case solved: Investigators used facial recognition to trace a man who was missing since 2024, bringing a long-pending case to a close.NBW executed in 20 minutes: A man against whom a non-bailable warrant was pending since 2023 was located at a railway station and arrested within 20 minutes of a facial recognition alert.Drug trafficking route mapped: Police used ANPR pattern analysis to establish repeated cross-state movements of a vehicle allegedly used for transporting ganja.