CP aims to ‘rebuild trust’ with govt and citizens
MUMBAI: Amidst an array of visitors and a pile of files to clear, Mumbai Police Commissioner (CP) Vivek Phansalkar on Friday spoke to Hindustan Times after completing five months on the job. The CP admitted that he was facing a big challenge—that of rebuilding the purportedly tarnished image of the 50,000strong police force.
When asked what his biggest challenge was after the tryst of two former CPS with law-enforcement agencies—sanjay Pandey’s arrest in a money-laundering case and Param Bir Singh facing serious criminal charges—phansalkar said his main aim was to rebuild the trust between the force and the government on the one hand and the force and citizens on the other.
The first step towards achieving this, he said, was to undo several things that had been done earlier. The Nirbhaya project, which was discontinued, is one of the things that Phansalkar proposes to re-start. The CP has sent the proposal to the government and will soon float tenders of Rs 140 crore for forensic science and cybercrime equipment and tools, including vehicles, for the protection of women in the city.
Under the Nirbhaya project, set up by the central government after the December 2012 tragedy in the national capital, a dedicated fund was set up, which could be utilised for projects specifically designed to improve the safety and security of women, especially in metro cities. It was a non-lapsable corpus fund, being administered by the department of economic affairs in the ministry of finance.
With a view to adopting advanced technology in policing to improve the quality of investigation into rape, other sexual offences and other crimes against women, the Mumbai police will receive advanced forensic kits, which include a 3-D scanner, biological evidencecollection equipment, fingerprint collection equipment and a rape kit. “A proposal has already been sent to the government in this regard,” said Phansalkar.
Another priority of the CP is augmenting the skills of officers in the cyber crime arena. Admitting that the force was illequipped to deal with cyber on account of a lack of proper training, Phansalkar said that training officers was something that needed to be brought focused on. “The deputy commissioner (cyber) has already completed two rounds of specialised training. We will now get experts in the field to train our officers first-hand,” he said. The CP also had a word of advice for citizens: to be extremely cautious and refrain from sharing any passwords or OTPS or even their personal details with strangers. “Citizens should be suspicious of everyone in cyberspace and avoid talking to anyone unknown,” he said. When asked about the increasing online frauds committed by out-of-state criminals, Phansalkar said that the police were coordinating with the central government and trying to establish a system with other states to tackle this issue. In Mumbai, the CP has already asked the specialised cyber crime units in the four regions of the city to keep a watch on the cases registered by local police stations, see if there are any visicrimes ble patterns in the cyber cases and then take over the investigation. Apart from cyber crimes, the CP said that cases involving fake cops had also shown a slight rise in the past few months. Taking cognisance of the seriousness of such cases, Phansalkar said he had instructed the joint commissioner of police (crime) to review all the cases and prepare the data and profiles of these criminals. After dismissed assistant inspector Sachin Vaze’s arrest in the Antilia explosives scare case, officers who had completed five years in the Mumbai crime branch were abruptly shunted out to local police stations and, in some cases, even outside the city in order to salvage the crime branch’s reputation. Phansalkar is looking at bringing back experienced officers into the crime branch units in order to strengthen the elite investigation wing of the city police force.
Another priority on the CP’S list is doubling the number of CCTV cameras in the city. “Early detection and prevention of street crimes, especially in cases of chain-snatching, is crucial for recovering stolen ornaments,” he said. “We have managed to solve most of the chain-snatching cases in the city with this, and to boost the success rate, we will add 5,625 CCTV cameras in 2,116 spots to the 5,371 cameras already installed across the city.”
After the success of Phase One in which 5,371 CCTV cameras were installed, Phase Two has been initiated on a war footing. It was initially stalled due to the trenching cost to be paid to the BMC.
Citizens should be suspicious of everyone in the cyberspace and avoid talking to anyone unknown VIVEK PHANSALKAR, Mumbai Police Commissioner