Picture a digital file flow system with the police in which the investigation officer, armed with a mobile app, captures everything on GPS-tagged and time-stamped videos that go straight into a live server accessible to all stakeholders in the criminal justice system.
In a first-of-its-kind initiative, the Kochi City police have successfully conducted a three-month-long pilot project of such a technically enabled system at the Kochi cyber police station. The new system was run parallel to the conventional paper-based system to avoid the ruptures of a sudden shift.
“This will be a game-changer in investigation and criminal justice system in the country. We plan to conduct a seminar in a month to create awareness about the immense possibilities of the project and bring aboard all stakeholders from judicial officers, senior police officers, prosecutors, defence lawyers, public, NGOs, and other departments. Our objective is to roll out the system across all police stations in Kochi city in the next three months by adopting it for a select bunch of cases,” said C.H. Nagaraju, District Police Chief (Kochi City).
In the conventional system, the police predominantly reduce everything related to an investigation into writing right from the stage of registration of FIR to preparation of scene mahazar to examination of witnesses, recording their statement, and the like. After amendments made to the Indian Evidence Act, electronic documents such as audios and videos are also admissible documents for the purpose of evidence collection and trial in a court of law.
In some important cases, investigation agencies have been complementing their evidence by using electronic documents such as CCTV footage and videographed witness statements. However, the use of audio-video footage as real-time accessible documentaries of evidence needs to be formalised in the criminal justice system by jettisoning paper work completely.
“Under the new system, an investigating officer should be able to record every step of investigation such as collection of oral evidence, documentary evidence, and scientific evidence electronically in real time and produce it before the court of law in the form of audio-visual files. Such audio-visual evidence should be spatially and temporally tagged, to protect its integrity. The evidence collection process would be geo-tagged with an automatic GPS log and date time stamping,” said Mr. Nagaraju.
At present, during the trial, the judicial magistrate reconstructs everything in his or her mind based on the written narratives of the investigation officer. Under the proposed new digitally enabled system, an investigation officer goes to a scene of occurrence, video-records everything with a voice narrative and then the GPS-tagged and time-stamped audio-video file is directly stored to the police server as an electronic scene mahazar. The investigating officer can include the witnesses to the scene mahazar in the same audio-visual record. Every oral statement by a witness can be recorded in audio-visual format. Documentary evidence can also be digitally signed or scanned and produced just for reference purpose as secondary evidence on the screen of the judicial officer, the prosecutor, and the defence lawyer. The scanned copies can he made in searchable format to reduce the travails of physical search.
Original documents or primary evidence and material objects can be parallelly made available to satisfy certain existing legal formalities. The investigating officers’ CD file or the case diary file and his conclusions can also be self-video recorded for the trial court to view and decide.
The live link of the password-accessible video can be shared on a need to access basis with the magistrates, public prosecutors, defence counsels, accused, and complainant for the conduct of trial or hearing of bail applications. It facilitates the quick disposal of bail applications and other miscellaneous applications at the trial court and high court.
Similarly, the examination of a witness could also be video recorded by the investigating officer. “This will enable the judge to get a better impression about the credentials of the witness,” he said.
