Visakhapatnam: Plans for visiting native villages this Sankranti have been dropped by many this time due to rising Covid19 cases. This is evident also from the reduction in number of requests made by residents with the City Police for the ‘virtual house guarding’ facility – or Locked Homes Monitoring Facility(LHMS).
Only 18 requests have come in this time against 81 during this season last year, police said.
The LHMS app managed by AP Police can be downloaded from the Play Store. The public can register their names and schedule of travel. The central monitoring system of the police directs the nearest police station to install the temporary CCTV system at the house.
If any suspicious crime including the house-break-in happens, the police get to see it on their screens and immediately send a team to the locality to nab the offenders.
Additional Commissioner of Police (central crime station) Shravan Kumar said, “The service is open till end of the festival season.”
An HPCL Visakh Refinery employee said, “We have dropped our Sankranti festival plan this year. Our company also facilitated a village model for people like us. Nearly 60 per cent of the 1,200 regular employees at our company dropped their Sankranti travel plans. Safeguarding the health is important. We hope this pandemic ends with this festival.”
City police commissioner Manish Kumar Meena recently said 806 theft cases were reported in 2021. The rate of recovery (of stolen valuables) was 58 per cent. Property worth Rs 6.49 crore had been lost, of which items worth Rs 3.73 crore was recovered.
Cases of housebreaks (both day and night) totalled 181 last year.
The police have nearly 100 CCTVs in its command. If the number of complaints increases, the police can procure more cameras to cover all the registered complaints under the LHMS, said a senior cop at MVP police station.
