In accordance with the ambitious plans to make Hyderabad a global city, a vision document is being prepared to make its police, “the most modern and people friendly force” in the country.
The vision will have more emphasis on using the cutting edge technology to make the force more accountable and also to bring down the contact between the police and the common citizen to the minimum required level. Hyderabad City Police Commissioner Mahinder Reddy told the media in his year end interaction that several initiatives were already launched soon after the new State of Telangana was formed on June 2 this year.
The new vision document will ensure the use of more and more technologies and evidence based enforcement”, he said. “Since the emphasis of the State Government was to develop Hyderabad into a global city, the focus is on modernisation of police force and a people-friendly system”, he said. As part of the modernisation plans, the city police is equipped with 154 brand new patrolling vehicles and 240 bikes connected to the command control through GPS to ensure that police can reach any place of incident within ten minutes. “We have also deployed 17 interceptor vehicles which will be kept ready at different places to foil armed attacks and create a sense of security among the people”, he said.
The technology-based initiatives to curb crimes include a web-enabled software ‘Crime Mapping’ to analyse area wise crime trends by taking note of longitude and latitude of crime spots to devise crime prevention strategies, a mobile application to detect and prevent automobile thefts, petition management services in all the 63 police stations of the city and daily performance report to track the performance of each member of the police force.
“We have also started Facebook pages for all the police stations in the city including the Police Commissionerate to make the police more responsive”, Mahinder Reddy said. The city police has also launched group SMS service for internal communication as well as the community contact to send lakhs of messages at the same time. “The system will also be used to send alert to all the traffic violators to clear the pending chalans”, he said. “To make the policemen more sensitive towards the citizen, we have started in house role play on how to deal with the victims and complainants. We have also trained 3,000 police personnel in soft skills”, the commissioner said.
Hyderabad has also become the first city in India to introduce cashless traffic chalan system under which the policemen will not take the fines in cash. “like the developed countries, Hyderabad police will only issue tickets and the people will have to pay the fines at a counter. As the pilot project has got a positive response, the project will be launched all over the city in two weeks”, he said.
In addition to the CCTV cameras all the junctions, the traffic policemen will also carry “body on cameras” to help monitor the behaviour of the policemen as well as the traffic rule violators. During the peak traffic hour, the police will only focus its attention on the regulation on traffic but the electronic gadgets will continue to monitor and book the violators. “We will send the chalans to the violators on the basis of the monitoring by cameras and the speed guns”, he said.
Despite increasing population and urbanisation, the crime rate in the city was under control, he said. A total of 21,035 crimes were reported during 2014 against 19,110 in 2013 and 18,744 cases in 2012.