New offenders major headache for State cops

In a diabolical revelation of sorts, it’s the crime-indulgence of ‘new offenders’ (means in police lexicon they are either debut criminals or criminals arrested but acquitted) that has shot up in Odisha recently.

Sample this: When in 2014, nearly 15 per cent of offenders were ‘serial criminals’ (means as per police lexicon they are criminals who have seen conviction for their earlier crimes); in year 2017 the ‘serial criminals’ proportion in Odisha was drastically down to hardly around 1 per cent. As per State police data 2017, when it had made arrests to the tune of nearly 99,000 persons in over 82,400 IPC crimes, only around a thousand are the ‘serial criminals’. That means, as per State police data, repeated offenders are not spiking crime rate but the ‘new offenders’.

And if the trend remains unchanged in future then threat to law and order scenario in Odisha is surely going for a complete tailspin.

Why this poses a serious threat is police cannot track such ‘new offenders’ as State police maintain and track movement of ‘serial criminals’ only, explained a senior police official in the State Crime Records Bureau.

The future also looks scary for Odisha, because, when in the last four years, the State was seeing criminals’ average acquittal rate to the tune of a whopping 64 per cent it was 26 per cent in 29 major States.

Moreover, the 2017 crime data of the State Crime Records Bureau revealed a rise in crime against women, riots other than communal, thefts, robberies and dacoities (in some districts) in Odisha. The data, further, reveals that riots due to previous enmity, family/village disputes and civil disputes etc have risen by a whopping 26 per cent.  More worrying is robberies, including bank heists, and thefts of motor vehicles in State which have also seen a spike in 2017 and in first 4-months of 2018. And nearly around 98-99 per cent of the arrested offenders are ‘new offenders’.

Similarly, it is seen that over years axis of dacoity in State have been corridors of Bhubaneswar – Cuttack – Puri – Nayagarh, Sambalpur –Rourkela, Angul – Dhenkanal – Baleswar, Sundergarh – Jharsuguda – Keonjhar and Ganjam. But year 2017 saw Koraput joining State’s dacoity corridor with a spurt of such cases by a whopping 121 per cent. While overall dacoity cases have come down in 2017, but corridors like Bhubaneswar – Cuttack and Sundergarh – Jharsuguda have shown a spike in total cases. This looks worrisome as they have been the State’s industrial nerve centres. And profiles of arrested dacoits reveal them as ‘new offenders’. It needs mentioning that a business survey done by the World Bank a few years ago has red-flagged that private investors consider dacoity and robberies as grave risks for the industrial-friendly ambience in Odisha.