MADURAI
Madurai City Police are planning simultaneous vehicle checks at about 100 places across the city, involving all police officials, including the Commissioner of Police, and men on duty to prevent crimes and nab antisocial elements.
“Whenever there is not much bandobust duty in the city, all the police officials and men on duty would be asked to hit the roads at short notice for vehicle checks. Simultaneous vehicle checks across the city would virtually lock city roads with a huge presence of police personnel. These short duration checks will also take antisocial elements and habitual offenders of traffic rules by surprise,” Commissioner of Police S. Davidson Devasirvatham said.
The city police were in the process of identifying vital locations and road stretches in every police station limits for conducting checks, he said.
“We want to ensure that the police personnel do not mechanically go to the same spots for vehicle check every time. Hence, the locations at each police station limits would be decided with different plans to ensure that the change in locations every time takes the people by surprise,” he said.
Similarly, the police are also planning to videograph select road stretches to capture the video of violators of road rules and send challans to their residences seeking payment of fines.
Stating that all police stations had video cameras with them, the Commissioner said the constables in each police station would be asked to videograph the traffic flow at particular road stretches for around an hour every day. The video clippings would be pooled in and the traffic police would identify the violators and send challans to their residences.
The video footage would help the police create evidence against the violators. “This will, to a great extent, prevent unnecessary quarrels between police personnel and road users when they are confronted for road violations,” Mr. Davidson said.
The police would also be spared of allegation of nepotism.
The Commissioner said once the videographying was started and challans were sent, it would send a strong signal to road rule violators who tried to escape from the police personnel when they were signalled to stop.
“People will not know from where and when the police might be videographying them and hence they would tend to not jump signal, overspeed or ride in a rash manner,” he said.