Crime capital: Snatching rose in year of lockdown
NEW DELHI: Nearly 22 people were victims of snatching and at least five robberies took place every day in the national capital in 2020, as these two key street crimes that are considered benchmarks of law-and-order in a city registered a rise last year despite a two-month-long hard Covid-19 lockdown and restrictions on movement and assembly that lingered for several months.
There were 7,965 snatching cases registered in 2020, a 27.11% rise from 2019, according to official police data released on Friday. Robberies, on the other hand, increased 0.36% with 1,963 cases.
In all, 266,070 criminal cases of all kinds were registered through the year — a 15.87% reduction from 2019; the first time such a dip has been noticed in at least a decade. Experts said this was along expected lines given the Covid restrictions.
The absolute numbers and per-day averages of several key crimes, however, remained high — highlighting Delhi’s dark underbelly.
The city still experienced a rape every five hours, a murder every 19 hours, and a car theft every 15 minutes — though these averages were better than in 2019 (when the corresponding figures for rape, murder and auto theft were 4 hours, 17 hours, and 12 minutes). A snatching took place almost every hour in 2020, as compared to 17 in a day in 2019.
Delhi Police chief SN Shrivastava said the police was trying to shift the focus of its crime analysis from cases filed to calls received by the police control room (PCR) — ostensibly to account for a possible gap between reporting and registration.
“We kept PCR calls as the
benchmark of the crime scenario. That shows a 38.19% decline in overall PCR calls [in 2020],” said Shrivastava. There were 24,746 PCR calls related to snatching last year, a 55.84% dip from the 56,037 such calls the year before that. PCR calls about robberies fell 37.01% from 18,210 to 11,471. “Once a person makes a PCR call, it is recorded in the system. One cannot hide the numbers,” Shrivastava said.
Vikram Singh, former DGP of Uttar Pradesh, said that the crimes were expected to dip due to the lockdown. “If the police are pointing to decrease in PCR calls, that was bound to happen due to a decrease in interactions between the public and criminals on the street for several months. If there was lesser interface between them, PCR calls were bound to reduce,” said Vikram Singh.
Of the 472 murders in the Capital in 2020, police data showed that personal enmity and disputes accounted for about 44%, and 21% were triggered by “sudden provocation” or “trivial issues”.
“Fifty-three of these deaths happened in the north-east Delhi riots. If they hadn’t occurred, there would be over 100 fewer murders last year compared to 2019,” Shrivastava said.
The comment underscored how 2020 was a year that saw several protest-related incidents in the city — be it the anti-citizenship (Amendment) Act clashes at Jamia, the Shaheen Bagh sit-in, or the January riots in north-east Delhi in which 581 people were injured, according to data released on Friday, apart from the 53 dead.
With vehicles parked for months, rather than on the roads, and borders closed during the Covid-19 lockdown, auto thefts were the lowest in five years — 24% down from 46,215 in 2019 to about 35,000 in 2020.There was also an overall reduction in crimes against women — rapes dipped from 2,168 to 1,699 and molestation from 2,921 to 2,186.
Vikram Singh said that if anything was to be credited for the decrease in crimes, it were the prohibitory orders due to the pandemic. “The policing in Delhi had nothing to do with the reduction. It is just that the criminals also couldn’t leave their homes,” he said.
The police said that cyber crimes rose during the lockdown period and reduced after the restrictions were lifted. In any case, 66 “mega frauds” mentioned by the police led to over 165,000 people being targeted. These 66 frauds also led to 213 arrests.
Police said that the number of recovered missing children was also high in 2020 compared to the previous year, thanks to a scheme of offering out-of-turn promotions to police personnel who help recover a large number of missing children. In 2019, 61.64% of the 5,412 missing children were traced. In comparison, last year 94.29% of the 4,297 children gone missing were recovered.
The police said that certain “violent crimes” such as extortion and kidnapping for ransom fell 33% and 27% respectively. “Violent crimes create scare and anxiety among residents,” Shrivastava said on the reduction of such crimes.
“If street crimes such as snatchings and robberies are increasing they indicate that criminals are not in check. There can be many reasons behind that, the prime being the involvement of first timers whose surveillance is not easy to do. These crimes can be brought under control only when beat constables focus on intelligence gathering and are kept away from law and order duties,” said Ajai Raj Sharma, former Delhi Police chief.
In an interview to Hindustan Times in December 2017, the previous Delhi Police chief, Amulya Patnaik, recognised snatching as one of the Capital’s biggest law-and-order concerns and proposed bringing in sterner laws and harsher sentences for the guilty.
While overall registered crimes dipped in the city, the number of people arrested for the offences rose 15.43% to 125,000 in 2020. These included eight people booked under the stringent Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) and 120 of those who carried rewards on their arrests. The data did not mention people booked for sedition, or under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, or UAPA.
The police commissioner said the data trend showed that the police has “encouraged registration of cases as they occurred”, pointing to how online FIRS, which can be filed without police interaction, decreased nearly 30% in 2020 as compared to 2019. “But offline FIRS, where police are involved in the registration process, have increased nearly 27% over the last two years,” he said.
Former Delhi Police commissioner Neeraj Kumar said, “Unlike the number of registered cases where there are chances of burking, calls made to the police control room (PCR) regarding crimes is a sure method and a reliable data to understand the crime trend. PCR calls are the clear indicator of crimes being under control. If there is a reduction in PCR calls, I should say it’s a happy situation.”