Service upgrade by city police welcome

The Bengaluru city police deserve to be complemented for constantly upgrading their facilities and interactions with the public. Adding to various helplines and the Twitter account, which has over 30
lakh followers (the highest number for any police force in the country), the city police have scaled up their ‘Dial 100’ service from 20 lines to 100 lines and rechristened it, ‘Nimma Dooru, Namma Nooru (Your complaint, our 100), which can simultaneously attend to nearly 100 emergency calls or complaints round the clock. Promising to attend to each call within six seconds, DCP Nagendra Kumar, chief of command control centre, says that in cases of crimes and accidents, the Hoysala vehicles stationed around the city, will reach the spot in less than 15 minutes. The move is the result of a visit Home Minister G Parameshwara and five senior police officers had made to London some time ago. They studied how the Scotland Yard and the Britain’s emergency service, 999, functioned. To their credit, the city police already run three separate helplines for children, women and elderly persons, which attend to hundreds of complaints every day.

With the explosion of vehicular population in Bengaluru, traffic management has become a major headache for the police. To tackle the problem, they have launched an app named Public Eye which people can access to report on the violations of traffic rules or congestions. By encouraging the public to upload photographs of traffic violations, the police have not only been able to ensure participation of many voluntary ‘policemen,’ but take disciplinary action against the violators. Apart from collecting fines, the traffic police should act proactively to clear bottlenecks and congestion which is their primary duty. As visiting police stations and finding the station house officer concerned to register complaints has been found to be one of the major problems the people have faced, ‘Namma 100’ promises to fix appointments with the police officers, which, if effectively implemented, should turn out to be a real boon.

With a population of 1.1 crore and still growing, and a floating population of 30 lakh, no amount of policing will be adequate for Bengaluru and the city has to rely on more personnel and technology. The home minister should ensure that the government’s decision to abolish the ‘orderly system’ is implemented immediately, so that 3,000 policemen will be available right away for the work they are trained for. Considering that crimes like murders, kidnapping and rape have been on the rise – Bengaluru figures as the third most unsafe metro city in the coun-try – the focus should firmly be on controlling them.