For nearly 10 months, 6-year-old Kamal, a resident of Meerpet, had been missing. After searching for their beloved son for many days, the parents had lost all hope of finding him again. However, thanks to the newly unveiled app by Telangana police – Cop Connect – Kamal could be reunited with his family.
The mobile application is exclusively meant for police use for internal communication with end-to-end encryption, and has a WhatsApp-like feature for transmitting messages, sharing photos, videos, location and documents on a real time basis. It also has an additional feature of facial recognition.
This facial recognition helped in identifying Kamal, who was housed at a rescue home (shishu vihar) in Dundigal, in the outskirts of the city.
According to Meerpet police, Kamal went missing from his home in October. After his parents registering a complaint, police collected his details and photo, which were uploaded in their database. Initially, they couldn’t trace the boy.
However, after the app’s launch, police have been conducting ‘Operation Muskaan’ across all the rescue homes in the state, where they take photos of the children, and find out if a case is registered against them, explained Meerpet Inspector Manmohan.
“When they (local police) took photos of Kamal, his case sheet came on the app. Subsequently, we went to the centre along with the parents. The parents immediately identified him and brought him home,” said Manmohan.
“This app is really useful to rescue missing persons,” he claimed.
Speaking to TNM, Kamal’s father, H Deepak, a relieved man, said, “He is our elder son. He was playing at home and suddenly went missing. We searched for him at many places, but to no avail.”
“We are glad that police have traced him. It is still a mystery how he went missing. The rescue home told us that people at Uppal stadium spotted him without any supervision and informed the police,” Deepak said.
Cop Connect was officially introduced on June 18. Launching the app, Telangana DGP Mahender Reddy said that the app would connect all the 60,000 police personnel across the state.
According to the police, this app is secure and doesn’t have a limit on the members in a group, unlike WhatsApp. The app has another feature – iMeeting – which helps in creating and scheduling department meetings.