Crimes keep occurring, one after other. The criminals are turning bold to open fire on the police. However, Uttarakhand police, seemingly bereft of spunk, are beating the retreat while being challenged the audacious way. This is despite the fact that police suffers from no dearth of modern equipments.
These incidents are laying bare Uttarakhand police’s inefficiency in taking such emergencies head-on. leave alone the common people, the police officers are themselves surprised by what happened on Monday - criminals throwing a dare to police by firing shots to scare them away and police supinely acquiescing by remaining idle. Not just that, some of them scurried for safety, concealing themselves in bushes and behind the stranded lorries, making way for the gangsters to escape. State Additional Director-General of Police (law and order) Ram Singh Meena said aside from suspending seven policemen, teams have been put into places to find out answers to several questions haunting them, the most important being as to why the policemen had not fired back at the criminals in retaliation when things were happening under their noseIJ
A senior police officer said that the armed policemen are hardly engaged in enhancing their firing skills. Once in two or three years, they are imparted such training by the police department. Under such circumstances, how one can expect that they would retaliate adequately in an emergency, the police officer wondered. It should be mentioned here that in May, this year, a police constable Surendra Singh was killed by a thief who was arrested in a two-wheeler theft case, in Haldwani. The thief attacked the constable with an iron rod when the latter was chasing him to foil his escape bid. In Dehradun, two constables were stabbed by a criminal Raju Box on September 29 late night in 2013. He managed to escape. Constables Angeshwar and Anuj of Dhara Chowki had gone to Naishwala Road after being informed of a brawl between two groups.