Vishal Dhupar says the AP police chose Sun systems for eCOPs because they wanted to build a system that was highly scalable and reliable

Ever imagined why it is such a lengthy process for a cop to book a murder case and conduct an investigation? Consider this: A cop finds an unidentified body on the road. It takes about a week’s time to register a case in the police station, call an ambulance to take the body for post-mortem, get a post-mortem report from a hospital and get the required documents from the municipal corporation. In addition our hypothetical cop would also need approval to dispose of the body and only then would he be in a position to take action. By that time the body would no longer be identifiable. The Andhra Pradesh state police’s eCOPS (e-Computerised Operations for Police Services) project aims to cut investigation time. Once eCOPS is in place, the entire process detailed above will take less than a day. Soon, this system will connect to hospitals, FSL, prosecutions and judiciary.

eCOPS will help increase the performance of state police units in controlling crime, maintaining law and order and in administration. The focus is to computerise activities related to crime control, administration and support services across the state to help division heads and senior officers obtain information that was hard to find earlier or even plain impossible to get hold of. It will also help police stations reduce paperwork and automate the maintenance of registers, report generation, data analysis, planning and co-ordination, enable the speedy detection of crime and monitor prosecutions. For citizens, the project will lead to online interaction with the police department over the Internet.

Vishal Dhupar, director-Sales at Sun Microsystems India says, “Andhra Pradesh’s Inspector General of Police (IGP) decided to implement eCOPS in March 2002 and by June 2002, the first phase was rolled in five districts — Hyderabad, Vishakapatnam, Vijayawada, Srikakulam and Ranga Reddy, covering 225 police stations. The IGP recommended Sun Solaris 9 and Sun enterprise servers for the entire project for the following reasons:

• Solaris 9 has ‘Orange Certification,’ which won 50 percent of the battle.
• The state police wanted to build a system that is highly scalable and reliable. Our server comes with redundancy built in and helps in dynamic configuration, utilises low voltage and has ‘Hot Swap’ features.”

eCOPS will be implemented in two phases. During phase one, the software for eCOPS has been developed by CMC.

Each district uses a Sun E450 server with four CPUs and 12 hard disks (offering 1.8 TB of storage in total). The central Oracle database of crime records is hosted at the DGP’s office in Hyderabad. This database will record information such as FIR (First Information Report) crime detail form, arrest/court surrender, chargesheet and case disposal reports. All five servers are connected to APWAN. The system is based on decentralised client-server architecture to facilitate independent functioning of all units.

Dhupar says, “The state police is planning to set up a data centre for National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) at Hyderabad.” The database at each of the locations will be replicated to this data centre.

Hyderabad-based system integrator, Locuz Enterprise Solutions was Sun’s implementation partner for the eCOPS project. It was responsible for end-to-end integration of Sun servers and storage across AP state. Locus will also provide a backup and disaster recovery system.

Coming up
The second phase of implementation will see eCOPS spread to 26 districts over the next 18 months. “Each of these districts will be using an E450 server,” adds Dhupar. eCOPS will be extended to other police units—APSP, CID, training installation intelligence and it will also connect prisons, judiciary, hospitals, revenue, and immigration (passports).