Parliamentary panel raps Delhi Police; asks to tighten belt

New Delhi, Dec 13: A parliamentary panel has come down heavily on Delhi Police saying it must stop shrugging off responsibilities in checking crimes against women and tighten its belt to provide security to the citizens of the capital.

The Department Related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs also rejected the Home Ministry's plea that the role of Delhi Police is limited on the pretext that a number of socio-economic and criminogenic factors are responsible for prevalent attitude against women.

It was of a strong view that the government should take immediate steps to improve forensic investigation facilities.

The Standing Committee said it does not concur with the idea of the Home Ministry that crime against women by people known to the victims continues to be nearly 96 per cent and by strangers just 4 per cent and hence the responsibility to prevent such crime lies with the society as a whole and other civic agencies besides police in the same proportion.

"The Committee, therefore, strongly recommends that Delhi Police, instead of shrugging off its responsibilities towards preventing crimes against women must chalk out effective and resilient strategy to combat crimes against women," the Committee said in its 189th report.

It suggested that wherever necessary, other agencies including civic bodies and civil society also may be involved in the process.

The Standing Committee notes that facilities of PCR vans of Delhi Police are an effective mechanism for policing, but the problem is that the staff manning the call centre find difficulty in identifying locations or understanding locations or names of the roads and places which victim or a person tell them.

It is because staff are not familiar with the locations and various places resulting that personnel posted take a lot of time trying to understand position.

"The Committee, therefore, recommends that the people at the call centre must be familiar and must have enough inputs on the location of various places of Delhi," the report said.

The Standing Committee said it is dismayed at the short and cryptic reply of the Home Ministry about procurement of PCRs by Delhi Police which is the basic infrastructure for working of Delhi Police.

PTI