Google Earth to come to the rescue of Bangalore police

Bangalore, March 4: With crime rates rapidly increasing in the Silicon Valley of the country, Bangalore city police will soon be using Google Earth to tackle the issue. Through this the police plan to "study crime trends in particular areas" which will help in taking precautions.

According to a report in DNA, the police will be using "file extension KML (or Keyhole Markup Language) format - used for storing geographic data that includes navigation maps and other driving instructions - on Google Earth".

Using this technology will help the police decipher the most common crimes in a particular area. They will then come up with stratergies to takcle the particular issue. BG Jyothiprakash Mirji, Bangalore police commissioner was quoted saying, "The crime mapping will be done for each and every crime case that is registered in respective police station jurisdiction," he said.

"The exact locations of crime like murder, robbery, chain-snatching and others (obtained through this scientific method) will be attached to the FIR hereafter so that senior officers can then analyse the kind of crimes taking place in particular jurisdictions and take proper preventive initiatives," joint commissioner of police (crime-west), Pronab Mohanty said.

"We are going to use the file extension KML in which we can mark the crime locations on Google Earth. We are planning to connect KML directly to FIRs so that when policemen click on it, automatically the location is marked on the FIR. All these days only the the place of occurrence of crime was mentioned in the FIRs, but merely with that we could not compare what kind of crimes happened in which localities and the number of crimes committed in particular places. That is why we are now asking all police stations to mark precise crime locations using KML extension file in FIRs," he said.

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