HYDERABAD: The Telangana police, particularly the Hyderabad city police, which claims to have been effective in preventing crime and detecting multiple cases using CCTVs, are failing to use them properly to establish the case in
courts, allowing the accused to go free.
Several such cases heard by various courts in 2022, including the murder of
a techie caught on CCTV, resulted in the accused's acquittal due to the police failing to submit the CCTV footage in the proper manner or being unable to connect the footage to the accused. While the police failing to submit the footage in accordance with procedures and determining its authenticity is one aspect, failing to submit the footage at all in court, despite detecting cases using the same footage, is another reason for the accused going free.
For example, in March 2016, a techie was brutally murdered by a group of people at a commercial building in Secunderabad. The murder had an eyewitness and CCTV footage that showed the offenders stabbing the victim.
The case was detected after using the CCTV evidence. However, the court acquitted the accused while pronouncing the judgment pointed out that the police failed to send the CCTV footage to the Forensic science Laboratory (FSL) to ascertain its genuinity and also the footage was not presented to the court as per the Evidence Act provisions.
In another case of a woman attacked by a group of persons in Abids in 2018, which ended in acquittal, a city court noted that the CCTV footage showing the attack was submitted to the court, but the police had failed to submit a certificate to show under whose custody the CCTVs were there and also the details of the person who extracted footage to present it in the court. In August 2021, the Afzalgunj police arrested three persons in a mobile snatching case based primarily on CCTV footage, but the footage was not submitted to the court during the trial. In August 2021, the Jubilee Hills police arrested a restaurant staffer for theft of music systems based on CCTV evidence, but the footage was not submitted before the court. It was not even collected from the crime scene. Same was the case of an accidental death reported in Chikkadpally in May 2016. According to the police, the accident spot was covered with several CCTVs and the police had collected the footage of the same. But it was not submitted before the court.
