Vijayawada, February 09, 2022: In what human rights advocates term as breach of privacy and fundamental rights, Andhra Pradesh police have been snooping on unsuspecting people moving in the night and forcibly taking their fingerprints and iris reading.
The officials claim this is to “find out” if anyone of them has a criminal background.
The police in the state have already been conducting what they call cordon-and-search operations mostly in the dead of the night, waking up citizens sleeping in their homes to check their documents, vehicles, gas cylinders among others. Of late, the police have embarked on a new mission – wait at road corners and junctions and stop people at random to know if they have criminal antecedents.
They take fingerprints and iris reading and using an app, upload these to search the database of criminals. They are allowed to move only if the database returns a “no match”.
The latest police action has kicked up a row. Human rights activists and legal experts view the operation as a breach of personal privacy of citizens. The police, however, justify their action as “part of their crime preventive measures”.
He claimed that the police would not store the fingerprints but verify with the police database to rule out any criminal history.
Lawyers and civil liberties activists, however, do not buy the police claims. High court advocate and vice-president of Civil Liberties Committee of AP, N Srimannarayana said that the action of the police is in violation of Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution, which gurantee equality before law and right to life and liberty according to the reports published in timesofindia.indiatimes.com.
