Conceding glaring lapses in the police forces in Punjab and Haryana, top cops of both the States on Wednesday asserted that policing needed to be revamped.
Accepting political interference in policing, DGP Haryana, K P Singh even said “Police is no more a strong arm of the state, but has been reduced to be a tool in the hand of strong”
Both the top cops Suresh Arora, Director General of Police, Punjab and K P Singh, DGP Haryana were speaking in a seminar on "Policing in India & the Challenges Ahead” organized by Progressive lawyers Society at Judicial Academy in Chandigarh.
The seminar was presided by Justice Surya Kant, Judge, Punjab and Haryana High Court, while former DGP Haryana Parkash Singh and legal luminary Senior Advocate Anupam Gupta also addressed the gathering.
During the seminar, Haryana police remained at the receiving end, first when its DGP accepted that the police has failed to come up to the challenges and later, Senior Advocate Anupam Gupta tore into the functioning of Haryana police, saying, that the state of Haryana withered away in February 2016, when its functionaries let the people on the mercy of the arsonists.
The Haryana DGP said that the changing socio-economical and political atmosphere in the country, changing patterns of man-woman relationship, rising social media and modern crimes have altogether changed the profile of crime in the country.
Accepting the lapses in the system, he said that police had not been able to catch up with the requirements of time.
Expressing his disdain on the happenings during Jat reservation row in February 2016, he said that social media caused more than 50 percent harm by inciting media through perturbed messages or information.
Signifying need to bring amendments in the criminal jurisprudence system, he said that provisions of Code of Criminal Procedure, devised by the British have now become out dated at a number of place and need to be amended to fix the lacuna in the law. He also advocated for making Aadhar data accessible to crime control agencies.
Suresh Arora, DGP Punjab, while admitting lapses in the police, raised the issue of human rights of the police personnel. Patting his force for successfully vanquishing terrorism from the state, he said that it was the Punjab police personnel only, who faced the fury of different agencies for violating human rights, but no body talks of the human rights of the police men.
He said that police department is audited for financial management, but it is never audited for the forensic and technical facilities. He said that he would be sending a proposal to the government for forensic and technical audit of police, so that the support base for the police also came to light.
later on bashing the Haryana police for its failure during the Jat reservation row, Sr, Advocate Anupam Gupta said that a complete overhaul of the police system was required in the country. Stressing on hard custodial interrogation of the accused, Gupta said that police needs hard police officers, who can interrogate criminals and not like those of senior Haryana Police officers like IGP Rohtak, who called around 400 policemen for his own security, when people in his district needed security during Jat reservation row.