Traffic police afraid of towing away vehicles

Hyderabad: The traffic police in the city are afraid to tow away high-end cars or SUVs on the road for fear of being confronted by motorists for damaging their vehicles. Such is the fear of potential conflicts that the police constables either drive the car seized for traffic violations themselves or ask the drivers to accompany them to the police station.

“There are several instances when high-end cars running into lakhs of rupees were damaged when old cranes were deployed to tow them away. The owners complained that the penalty was a few hundred rupees whereas the cost of repairing the damage runs into thousands of rupees,” said a traffic Inspector.

The dilemma of the traffic police came into the public domain recently, when the traffic police who caught a driver at Jubilee Hills for driving in an inebriated state forced another passenger in the car to drive the vehicle to the police station. 

The reason, the police stated, was that the constable did not know how to drive the high-end car nor did they have ultra modern or a modern crane to tow away the vehicle.

“There are only the ‘hook’ type cranes with the traffic police stations. When it is used, there are chances of the vehicle getting damaged resulting in complaints from the public. For now the old cranes are used only to tow away cars which develop a snag and get struck on the road resulting in traffic jams,” an inspector said.

However, the traffic cops say that they need to have modern cranes to tow away vehicles from no-parking areas. 

As of now, there are only a couple of cranes owned by the department and the remaining are on hire as the cost of paying the drivers and the staff is high, the inspector said.