TN Police: Chennai: NCRB की मानें तो हर 80वें मिनट में चेन्नई पुलिस के पास आता है मदद मांगने के लिए एक कॉल

Chennai: The Tamil Nadu police received a distress call once every 80 minutes last year. That puts the state at the ninth place nationwide, according to National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) statistics, but the calls in 2010 doubled compared to the previous year. In 2009, Tamil Nadu received 3,080 distress calls while in 2010 it registered 6,351 such calls. That was nothing compared to the job the Delhi police had, getting a call every 25 seconds (over 19 lakh calls in 2010). Despite boasting of over 85,000 personnel on its rolls, Delhi Police don't seem to have been able to mitigate the miseries of residents facing emergencies. If the NCRB figures are an indication, the problem only seems to have worsened last year, with the national capital registering an increase of nearly 60,000 calls.

With a 13,000-strong staff, the Chennai police seem to be doing better. They got around 1,200 distress calls in 2010. But officials say prank calls accounted for some 20% of them. Callers to '100' get a recorded message in Chennai warning them against playing pranks on the police distress line. This should be enough to deter most pranksters and make them hang up, but some seem to be determined to make mischief. Greater Chennai police commissioner J K Tripathy said they were cracking down on these non-serious callers. "In July alone, the police arrested six persons, including three juveniles, for making prank calls to the police control room," Tripathy told TOI. Recently, the state government sanctioned a new deputy commissioner of police (DCP) to man the city police control room that receives these calls. Ke Ve Kabilan, who was appointed to the post on Sunday, will also monitor the patrol vehicles that respond to these calls. Tamil Nadu ranks among the states in which the distress calls increased though others, such as West Bengal showed a decline. Mumbai, which has some 45,000 police personnel, logged over 13,000 calls in 2010 - an increase of over 40%.