Bengaluru: The city police are planning to revamp all police stations across the city taking into account each station’s jurisdiction, its population and the number of police staff allocated to a police station.
“A proposal was submitted to the government over a year ago to re-organise police stations including traffic police stations according to the presently existing jurisdictional area and its population to enhance better policing,” said a senior officer. “However, it did not materialise due to various reasons, including political changes,” he added.
A few police stations have a large area of jurisdiction, but do not have the required people-police ratio, as there is a staff crunch. For example, the Madivala police station, before the Bommanahalli police station came into being, had roughly 10 sqkm radius jurisdiction with heterogeneous mix of crimes due to the floating population and because of it being the gateway to the city, the Hosur Road.
Since March, after the Bommanahalli outpost was commissioned as a police station, the burden for Madivala police has reduced bringing down its jurisdiction to around 5 sqkm. However, a senior police officer said, “Even now, we have a total of 79 staff at our police station for a population of 3 to 4 lakhs and we require at least 120 to 150 staff for effective policing.”
Sources said details of each police station will be collected, regarding their patrolling routes and the requirement of men. Revamping will not only help pinpoint target area that requires attention, but also effective policing by working on designated patrolling routes allocated for each beat at a given station.
There are few police stations with smaller jurisdictional areas that are overstaffed. For example, the Cottonpet police station and the City Market police station have smaller
jurisdiction with a decent number of staff. “Police staff from smaller jurisdictional stations can be moved to police stations which are overburdened,” said the officer.
