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17 November, 2021
CNA/cl(gl) (10 Oct 2021). CNA. Caught on camera: How 90,000 police cameras across Singapore help solve crimes.
Video surveillance, and more specifically the PolCam network, has helped solve and deter crimes as well as find missing people throughout Singapore.
SINGAPORE: On closed-circuit television (CCTV) footage, a masked man in dark clothes scurries across an empty road.
He then disappears into the corner of the frame, before being spotted scuttling down a narrow street.
He wouldn’t have known it then, but he was less than 17 hours away from being arrested by the police, for assaulting a 92-year-old man and robbing him of S$1,200 earlier that morning.
Footage from police cameras showed him walking from a certain estate towards Jalan Enam, where the robbery happened. Cameras then caught him heading back in the same direction where he came from.
“Based on that, we basically combed limitless numbers of cameras around the estate until we found the suspect,” said Inspector Zaidi Salim, an investigation officer from the Bedok Police Division, as he recounted the incident from March 2020.
The culprit was eventually seen walking up a staircase to the second floor of a public housing block in Cassia Crescent.
The 51-year-old man was eventually sentenced to six years in jail.
The case is among the more than 5,000 that have been solved with the help of police cameras since they were introduced islandwide in 2012, said the police in a news release on Sunday (Oct 10).
To date, more than 90,000 “PolCams” have been deployed at public housing blocks, multi-storey carparks, neighbourhood centres and town centres. Police said they have “proven to be an invaluable source of investigative leads”.
The goal is to install more than 200,000 such cameras by 2030.
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