Previously it was a lengthy and tedious process to retrieve records of individual criminals based on name, father’s name, caste and address. Further it was almost impossible to identify criminals of each district because there was no comprehensive and integrated criminal record system. The PITB has developed the CRMS based on CNIC number. It is a digitised system that contains personal details (CNIC, appearance, photos etc.) of criminals. The idea is to maintain a comprehensive database containing complete criminal profile (including personal information, physical appearance, modus operandi, gang, criminal history, fingerprints, and photographs) that can be easily fetched via CNIC and/ or biometric information as required. It is easy to retrieve and search over a web-based mechanism, smartphone or even SMS. For criminal record verification of suspects, biometric devices are connected to the CRMS. It is used for both live and latent fingerprints scanning and matching.
Now the manual fingerprints record is successfully digitised and available in CRMS database with complete profile of individual criminals. Multiple applications related to law and order are integrated with this digitised database: PSRMS (FIR Management System), HRMIS, Hotel Eye, Prison Management System and Tenant Registration systems. Using CRMS an investigation officer sitting in any police station of Punjab can apply his filters of known information and make a search in the central database. This system is being used in various ways to investigate any case. If a victim of a mobile phone snatching incident reports in a police station and he remembers some details of the snatcher. An officer can apply all the known filters and search the criminal in his own district as well as in the Punjab server. More filters will have better chances of success. Based on the applied filters, the results will be shown on a screen and these pictures can be shown to the victim for identification.
This system is present in each police station of the Punjab and the PITB team is constantly working with the Punjab police to improve this system. Another important utility of this system is the issuance of Character Certificates. Now, a police officer just enters basic information of a citizen and instantly checks his/ her criminal history. No one with a criminal history can get the character certificate issued while other citizens get their character certificates very swiftly. The fingerprint records are being used to identify the abandoned bodies. Also the fingerprints are used in another application Criminal Record Identifier (CRI) to identify criminals. The CRMS is equipped with the Megamatcher fingerprint matching library. It has matching speed of 20 million fingerprints per second. The system also keeps logs of each entry and searches and records details in a dashboard. The district police officers (DPO) can always keep an eye on the performance and statistics of their staff and officers using this dashboard. On average 550 new records are entered into the system from all over Punjab.