Lodging a police complaint will be as easy as withdrawing cash from an ATM, if an initiative of Bengaluru police sees the light of day.
Walk into an ATM-like kiosk in the neighbourhood and narrate your complaint to the video camera installed there. The complaint-receiving station will send the clip to the police control room, which will forward it to the jurisdictional police. The audio-visual complaint will be converted into an FIR, and the complainant will receive an acknowledgement and updates on the investigation.
Set to be installed Bengaluru, the kiosks seek to eliminate human intervention from the complaint-registration process and address complainants’ concerns like embarrassment and confidentiality.
Police are launching the initiative following the success of a similar project by Bhubaneswar police. Instant Complaint Logging Internet Kiosks (IClik), set up in the Odisha capital early this year, receive up to five complaints a day. Joydeep Nayak, an IGP-rank officer from Orissa, visited Bengaluru recently and held meetings with the city police, who are testing a machine to receive and register complaints.