With Spurt in crime, the city police in Patna, is all set to go hi-tech, thanks to initiative taken by police head quarters in this regard. Police Patrol cars will now carry GPS. Only a few weeks ago, police officers from IG to Dy SP and many SHO of the state capital were reshuffled after a bizarre incident, in which one girl was stripped in a public place on a busy exhibition road round. It earned lot of criticism for the police and national media, both electronic and print, got flooded with news related to police apathy and non-competence.
The young IPS Manu Maharaj was made city SP and crackdown has been unleashed on the criminals bring the morale of criminals down to a considerable level. Now herculean task with the top cop of the city is to keep constant watch on the movement of patrol cars, which is said to be 100 odd in number, so that the police personnel performs up to the expectations. IG PN Roy, who is also an expert in disaster management and has undergone trainings in countries like USA has chalked out plans to install Global Positioning System (GPS) on all the patrolling cars of the city in first phase.
It has been seen in the recent times that Police patrol cars remained conspicuously absent from the site of crime and could only be located when the criminals left the place of occurrence (PO). The arrangement has already been done that at least one police patrol should touch one particular place within 10-15 minutes. But due to absence of any device, the police parties on the patrol cars could easily lie about their locations at the time of commitment of crimes. Now with the installation of GPS, this problem can be checked and no police patrol can lie about its location. The SP or any other senior police official can locate the particular police parties.
If this experiment gets successfully implemented, it will certainly enhance the mobility of the police patrol parties and also help, in a better way, to keep watch on the movement of police patrol cars. At present the city police use primitive method of wireless as the sole method of communication which is far from satisfaction. There are several electronic devices easily available in the market which can intercept and leak the messages. Naxalites are using this methodology on large scale and thus they easily track the movement of police force. The leakage of wireless messages are said to be major cause of attacks on police by Naxalites.
The use of GPS will certainly improve the efficiency and communication network of the police, provided it is implemented religiously. While Nitish Kumar, the CM, has been relentlessly trying to improve the police force to bring the house in order, there are large numbers of elements in the police department itself who leave no stone unturned to thwart the reform process. The official website of the police department still carries the name of DN Gautam as DGP, whereas he has retired few weeks ago. Such is the apathy and irresponsibility of the senior police officers. Hopefully this innovation would go un-sabotaged and is implemented in letter and spirit. If it happens so will improve efficiency of the city police and help improve law and order, bring down crime rate and un-choke the traffic of the city.
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