May 10, 2015 – Lagos State Government has charged residents to register with the Lagos State Resident Registration Agency, (LASRRA) to make the job of tracking criminals easy.
General Manager LASRRA, Ms. Olayinka Fashola made the appeal after presenting awards of recognition to some registered residents in line with the customary recognition of recognizing every landmark one hundredth registration.
She said the agency has infrastructure that is sophisticated enough to assist the police and other security agencies in the area of crime investigations.
“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 house maid 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, 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 from because we have the information.”
She explained that a by-product of LASRRA’s registration process is the ability to identify and locate specific individuals as long as they reside in Lagos and are registered with the agency.
The LASRRA boss also disclosed that the agency has already deployed infrastructure and manpower to scale up to the next stage of registering residents by focusing on its social media and other online platforms.
She revealed that after successfully registering over three million residents, the agency is set to commence distribution of the permanent residents’ cards starting next week Friday.
She also lamented the low turn-out of Lagosians for the residents registration exercise, saying “of the over 20 million residents of the state, only three million have been captured since the exercise started two years ago.”
“Many residents of the state were so busy that we had to sometimes visit them in their offices to register them. From the information we gathered from the registration, we discovered that more Lagosians board the Bus Rapid Transit, BRT buses than those who drive their cars.”
“We discovered that a greater percentage of Lagos resident now travel by water than what it used to be few years ago,” she said.
