Tirupati: Crime rate down due to community policing in check

Tirupati: The community policing launched by the Chittoor district police division on January 25, 2016 is now paying rich dividends and helping the police in the reducing the crime rate. Since its inception, the district has seen a decline of 17 percent in both road accidents and property crimes, whereas crimes against women and bodily crimes have seen a fall of 2.4 and 1.2 percent.

This was because of the overwhelming response from various sections of the public, including students, government and non government employees, farmers and other people who stepped forward to join the community policing.

The district police are now confident of bringing down the crime rate to zero level in the coming years, as the CPO project has penetrated to the grassoot level across the district and state as well.

According to the official reports, as of now the community policing has seen an enrolment of 4270 Community Police Officers (CPOs).

The strength of CPOs is almost double in number when compared to the district civil force, which has 1867 police men including ASIs - 130, HCs -328, PCs- 1409. Out of the total volunteers, 96 per cent are male and the remaining female, in which 89 per cent of the CPOs are aged between 18 to 35, 8 per cent are aged between 36 to 45 and 3 per cent were aged above 45 years.

Among the above CPOs 45 per cent are students, 13 per cent are farmers, 10 per cent are labourers, 8 per cent are drivers, 12 per cent are employees, 4 per cent are business peoples, 4 per cent are senior citizens and 6 percent belong to the ‘others’ category. In general, the social service groups like NCC and NSS are utilised in traffic regulation duties only. But, here CPOs are being utilised in many fields apart from road safety programmes, traffic regulations and enforcement work.

Peculiarity is that, CPOs are maintaining some of the station records as well and few are being utilised for writing part II case details. The women CPOs are mainly utilised as receptionists, whereas the young CPOs are being utilized for night beats and traffic regulation. Adding to the technology intervention, whereby in every police station across the district, a CPO with software background is being utilised for data entry work and for maintaining CCTNS project.

In rural areas, the CPOs are assisting the station house officers and village police officers in village visits, passing on information about is happening in the villages, crime scene protection, traffic restoration and victim assistance in road crash events.

While the urban CPOs are supporting the SHO in enforcement work like issuing traffic challans, vehicle checking, drunken driving etc, the rural CPOs are actively participating in law and order bandobast duties and substituting the police personnel, instead of pooling up to the building of a huge force.

Meanwhile, speaking at the CPO day celebrations held at Chittoor on Friday, SP Vikrant Patil reiterated that with the inception of CPOs the flow of information about the happenings in rural and urban areas was increased, and thus the social evils were being curtailed to a maximum level.

He also thanked the CPOs and appreciated their efforts in making the CPO project a grand success and added that they were looking forward to utilise the services of CPOs in the upcoming elections.