Police turn mobile to monitor criminals, self

Turkish police seek to step up efforts to track crimes and members of the police force who mistreat suspects with plans to launch mobile video surveillance vehicles fully equipped with cameras. The Turkish National Police's Department of Public Order has developed a new project to broaden its surveillance of criminal activities and handle cases of police brutality. Patrol cars fully equipped with in-car cameras as well as external cameras will be on the road in the near future in order to help with enforcement while preventing excessive use of force by the police.

Practically a mobile version of the Mobile Electronic System Integration (MOBESE), a network of street cameras all across the country, cars with interior cameras, cameras on the back, sides and top of the vehicle can be rotated 360 degrees. They are enhanced with facial recognition and license plate recognition features, high-definition video quality and will be turned on once the car's engine is started. Cameras can stream footage to a central station where all MOBESE cameras in a city are connected and watched via uplink.

They will be primarily used for detecting stolen vehicles, vehicles belonging to suspects and car bombs. Equipped with POL-NET software, which contains a database of wanted persons and former convicts, the cars will be able to detect particular wanted individuals if he or she is matched in the database through a facial recognition system.

Cars will have a connection to MOBESE surveillance centers in every city and staff at those centers will have access to the cameras around the clock.

Mobile MOBESE will also address the hotly debated issue of evidence of police brutality. Police officers will be required to keep the cameras on while responding to criminal cases and the recordings will be eligible to be used as evidence against police officers in case of potential police brutality or resisting arrest.

Critics often accuse the police of foiling investigations into police brutality by tampering with the ubiquitous security cameras, since cameras have been found out of order in a number of cases allegedly involving police violence toward suspects. A debate over alleged police intervention to security cameras to cover up the violence that happened during the trial of a police officer accused of beating up a Gezi Park rioter to death in 2013. Turkish media outlets had claimed a police officer had forced the staff of a hotel whose security camera showed the beating, to delete the footage showing the moment of the incident.

A recently released report by The Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (TESEV) shows 60 percent of Turkish citizens interviewed for TESEV's survey believe that police misconduct goes unpunished.

The vehicles will first take to the streets in the cities of Istanbul, Ankara and İzmir and, if proven successful, they will be used across the country.

MOBESE vehicles are already in use by the Turkish National Police in several cities including Afyon, Bursa and Kırıkkale, but their number is few. The new project aims to make their use widespread.

The MOBESE system was first installed in Turkey in 2002 and has expanded throughout the country since then.

Mobile MOBESE is among the police's modernization efforts to keep up with international standards in law enforcement. Another project is mobile kits of tablet computers, printers and cameras that will be distributed to police officers to speed up crime scene procedures. It is modeled after a plan by the New York Police Department whose members were given similar kits. The kits that are planned to be delivered to officers in New York will help them file reports from smartphones and tablets instead of going to the police station and access regularly updated database of wanted persons and criminal activities. The police kits in Turkey will have the exact same features.