Police plans to set up IT cadre

After the AAP government, the Delhi police is now in process of streamlining its vigilance mechanism and e-services for transparent and efficient policing in the city.

Issuing a series of directions at a recent high-level meeting, police commissioner Alok Kumar Verma directed the vigilance department to send its officers, who are well acquainted with maintenance of police records, to survey one police station of each district every week and file a report of shortcomings every Monday. He also directed his officers to seek help of the National Informatics Centre (NIC) for preparing a proposal for the Union home ministry for setting up a separate information technology cadre in the force.

The top cop expressed his anger over reports that some complaints against officers were marked for inquiry to the same officers. He directed that complaints against the police officers should be marked for inquiry to the public grievance cell or vigilance branch of the respective districts.

A highly-placed source said that the police chief was very keen to ensure that all complaints raised during public hearings were redressed on time. He instructed the officers to devise a system which could automatically generate SMS alert related to any complaint coming to his office during public hearing. He said that the same SMS alert should be sent to the special commissioner or joint commissioner for follow-up action.

What surprised every one at the meeting was that a large number of VIP references and complaints were pending for long with the force. The top cop directed all the officers present to monitor the VIP complaints as priority.

Mr Verma directed his men to review all e-initiatives under their respective jurisdictions. He said that whenever a person visits a police station for registration of his/her complaint related to house theft or burglary, it should be registered in the police station as such crimes require a collection of evidence from the crime scene. He directed the investigating officers to personally visit the place of crime for collection of evidence.

When the special commissioner (intelligence) raised an issue regarding sending of hard copies of daily summary of information (DSI) by the special branch to various officers of the force, Mr Verma directed that the same would now be sent to the officers on their official e-mail accounts. He also directed his officers to send only extracts of particular reports to other states having direct relevance with them.

Mr Verma emphasised the need for wider use of e-learning for imparting refresher training to policemen on emerging trends of crime and new areas of policing. He directed the special commissioner (training) to consult the Maharashtra police where the concept was already in practice for its expeditious implementation.