LAHORE: A man accused of robbing a private bank of Rs1 million at gunpoint in Lahore’s South Cantonment was arrested within three hours, the Punjab Safe Cities Authority says, crediting its cameras and an artificial intelligence system for tracing him.
By the authority’s account, local police asked for help in identifying the robber and working out his route. Its AI-based system and camera network established who he was and where he went, the footage was handed over as evidence, and police set up checkpoints across the city and caught him.
The account comes from the authority alone. Police have not publicly named the suspect or given details of the case, and he remains an accused person until a court decides otherwise.
It was one of three successes the authority has publicised in recent days. In the second, two brothers aged seven and four who went missing from Mardan were found in the Waris Khan area of Rawalpindi and taken to the Child Protection Bureau there.
The authority’s Mera Pyara team, which traces families of lost children, circulated a video of the boys on social media. Their father saw it and contacted the bureau. After verification, both children were handed over to him. The case crossed a provincial boundary, from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to Punjab, and was closed by a phone screen.
The third is one this newspaper has reported: a senior journalist’s car, stolen outside the press club, was followed by cameras despite a fake number plate and recovered in Jhelum. The authority says its network now covers 43 cities.
Each case is a real result. Together they are also publicity, and publicity shows the numerator only. The authority does not say how many robberies its cameras failed to solve, or how many missing children were traced out of how many reported.
The harder questions concern the AI itself. The authority has not explained how its identification system works, how often it produces a wrong match, how long footage of ordinary citizens is kept or who audits its use. A system able to pick one man out of a city in three hours can do the same to anyone.
Those questions will grow, not fade. Sindh’s police chief said this week that future policing will rest on AI and electronic surveillance, and Punjab is extending its camera network to every district. Elsewhere, including in Britain and the European Union, police use of facial recognition has prompted court challenges and legal limits.
The authority also hosted a delegation of student police volunteers this week, part of an effort to win over the young. Publishing its error rates would do more for trust than any tour.
Leave a Reply