Lucknow, Sep 12 : The Uttar Pradesh Police has embarked on a special drive to identify potential criminals and crime spots. DGP Vijay Kumar said: 'Predictive policing is the use of analytical techniques to identify targets for police intervention with the goal of preventing crime, solving past crimes or identifying potential offenders and victims and also the nature of crime at a particular time/place. "We have picked up computer operators, gazetted officers from different districts and trained them about convergence of various databases that includes FIR data, criminal crime record data, social media inputs, online-offline application data, CCTNS databases and UP 112." These officials will train sub-inspectors and station house officers for further implementation at ground zero. The DGP said the use of predictive policing will have positive impact on lives of people. 'For example, if an area is registering a spike in chain snatching cases, then policing will be based on that. Similarly, if any specific area is under the impact of thefts in houses, then policing will be changed accordingly,' he said. ADG UP 112 Ashok Singh said 68 gazetted officers and 260 non-gazetted police officers across the state received training at a day-long workshop on Monday to understand 'predictive policing' and then how to use it in their respective districts. "We have created a database of calls landing at UP 112 which is about 17 crores in a span of seven years from across the state," said Singh. He added that using the voluminous data of UP 112 and predictive policing, the district police can place pickets, patrol and beat monitoring. 'Cops were given training on how to use crime mapping tools and understand the data and then use an effective predictive policing module." /IANS