My work will only speak – Pune police commissioner Rashmi Shukla

In a small but significant reform in policing, the top brass of Pune city police will display their personal mobile phone number at the police stations to make the lower rung staffs more responsive and assure citizens that senior officers are communicative in cases their grievances are not resolved.

Last year joint commissioner Sunil Ramanand had displayed his phone number alongwith that of the zonal DCPs, to get confidential information from common people. Information received from general public is helping police crackdown on several illegal activities including gambling and prostitution dens.

The boards being put up at the police stations will have numbers of senior police inspector in-charge of the police station, divisional ACP, zonal DCP as well as those of the joint commissioner and commissioner of police. People can talk to senior officers of their grievances are not addressed.

Then there will be boards indicating rights of citizens about getting their complaints registered and get copy of FIR free of cost without any delay.

The third board will have details of grievance redressal day to be organised every Saturday between 10 am to 11.30 am where people can be informed about action taken on their complaints.

Another significant step is by the newly appointed police commissioner Rashmi Shukla, who chose to publicly display her personal phone number. Many of the previous commissioners had removed their phone numbers from official website of Pune police.

Punekar  News spoke several police inspectors and senior officers about this move by the new commissioner.  They believe that this serve two purposes: People will feel that the police are communicative and levels of frustration with the keepers of the law will go down; and policemen also know that not only were they on call but also their boss.

“This is expected to make them a little more alert, a bit more responsive, because they knew if complainants did not get them, they had the option of calling the police commissioner herself,” an officer told Mirror.

Another IPS officer added, “Sometimes we get calls at odd hours for routine issues like stopping music being played loud at night. I think these issues can be solved through channel like calling the control room by dialing 100. We expect public to follow the procedure like giving written complaints to police chowky/police station instead of calling senior officers in the first place. Once they feel that local police staff is not able to solve their problems or not behaving properly, they can approach the senior officers.”

APPEAL

1 – Lodge complaint without any hesitation.

2- It’s your right to get your FIR registered without any delay and get its copy free of cost.

3 – The FIR has to be registered in your words.

4 – Police will take cognisance of your complaint and register it on time.

5 – If any policeman misbehaves then complain to the senior inspector/inspector or assistant inspector present at the police station.