Over the last week, the media has been lambasting Bengaluru police for the couple of molestation complaints received during and immediately after the New Year celebrations in Bengaluru. TV channels including Times Now, NDTV, India Today and News X revelled in criticising Bengaluru Police, Karnataka Home Minister and virtually shaming all Bengalurians as if Bengaluru is a hell for women.
Now it is time for some of these critics to eat their words as Bengaluru police have quickly solved two of the molestation complaints, intelligently applying their Cyber Investigation skills.
Firstly, one of the incidents occured in the dead of the night when a girl was returning from a New Year party at 2.45 am when two boys came on a scooter and one of them forcefully kissed the girl and then threw her down violently.
This incident was investigated by checking the CCTV video and also the mobile tower details to track all the mobiles which were present during the time in the vicinity. Since not many people were around at that time the number of devices to be tracked were less in number and hence Police were able to successfully identify the mobile owners who were roaming around and arrest them.
The second case was more interesting. In this case, a burkah clad woman had given a complaint that while she was walking to her work around 6.30 am, she was stalked by a person who kissed her, bit her tongue, and also injured her by trampling her foot and later went away after some dogs started barking. This was sensitive since it involved a muslim woman. The TV critics also commented that the girl was more than decently dressed, it was morning and not the dead of the night etc to say that the incident reflected that Bengaluru has become a really bad city for woman.
Those including the Karnataka Home Minister who felt that the first incident and the New Year celebration related disturbances were caused more because of the circumstances in which people were drunken and not decently dressed etc. had to hide themselves because the second incident was completely out of the pattern.
But here the innate intelligence of the Bengaluru Police came to fore. We are not aware of the individuals who were responsible for this successful investigation but they need to be commended since they used what is considered an advanced form of “Cyber Intelligence” which was “Gait Recognition in CCTV footages”.
“Gait Recognition” is an art and science of identifying the pattern of walking of an individual and identifying him. It is considered as an innovative “Biometric” that can be used to identify people in a crowd using only the CCTV footages. In other countries, research s being done on how to develop an identifiable pattern of the “Gait” of a person through video images available in the public and thereby identify terrorists in a crowd.
Our Bengaluru police may say that even though they might not have used the technology to the level of analyzing the gait movements through software, they were able to spot visually that the walking style of the alleged offender was similar to one of the relative of the victim who also came to the Police station to give a complaint. They also used the mobile records to know that this person had spoken to the alleged victim minutes before the incident in the early morning hours.
It is only a matter of record that the offender was actually a relative of the girl and both had enacted this drama of molestation so that they could convince the elders to their marriage under the pretext that the tainted girl will not be married by anybody else and this relative (husband of the sister of the victim) could marry her as his second wife by convincing his first wife (sister of the victim) that he was doing a service to the victim girl.
What a great plot!… but very disgusting since in future any genuine complaint by a lady will always be seen with suspicious eyes.
Law enforcers are scratching their head on how severe should be the punishment to such persons who tried to cheat the law enforcement machinery and brought shame on the entire population of Bengaluru…
Nevertheless, let us not fail in our duty in saluting the police personnel who in all probability could be just a constable in the Police station who identified the similarity of the walking styles of a living person to the crime video and helped in the successful investigation.
Naavi
