Lagos State government has charged residents to register with the Lagos State Resident Registration Agency (LASRRA) to make the job of tracking criminals easier. The government reiterated this call in the wake of incessant cases of kidnappings in the state.
 
General Manager, LASRRA, Ms Olayinka Fashola, said the agency has infrastructure that is sophisticated enough to assist the police and other security agencies in the area of crime investigations, only if Lagos residents embrace the registration exercise.
 
Only about three million Lagos residents have thus far registered with LASRRA. Fashola, while presenting awards of recognition to some newly registered residents, said the captured data makes it easier to track missing or kidnapped persons.
 
According to her, we can actually identify people with the infrastructure we have in LASSRA. So, with the kidnapping incident that involved the Orekoya family in Lagos in which their housemaid kidnapped their children, we could actually verify if that lady is who she said she is.
   
“We have facial recognition application, where if we have a good photograph of her, we can quickly run through our system and verify if that was her. From there we can look at her address. 
 
“From what we have gathered, most people register with someone else’s identity, so we could have looked at the registration before and after to see if the addresses are the same. We could give the police a starting point as to where to start their investigations because we have the information,” she said.