Delhi Police are taking a cue from its counterparts in major world cities like New York, London, Paris and Dubai to prepare a roadmap to reduce response time to reach a distress caller, Delhi High Court was informed on Wednesday.
In an affidavit filed before a Bench of Justices B D Ahmed and Ashutosh Kumar, the Delhi Police said they were carrying out a “comparative study” of response time of other police forces in major metropolitan cities across the world to evolve a strategy to deal with the situation.
It said a “request was moved to the Joint Secretary of Ministry of External Affairs.... to obtain and provide the information/data of response time of the police forces in other metropolitan cities of the world such as Shanghai, Tokyo, Istanbul, Madrid, Paris, London, New York, Hong Kong, Singapore etc to evolve strategy and prepare a roadmap for reducing the response time... to reach a distress caller”.
The police said they have received information regarding the response time of police forces in London and Madrid and were awaiting data from the other cities as well.
It further said that proposals to increase the manpower of Delhi Police by 54,212 have also been sent to the Lieutenant Governor of Delhi, Ministry of Home Affairs and the Delhi government. Regarding issue of women’s safety in the Capital city, the police said its PCR unit has launched a pilot project in which five PCR vans, comprising all women staff including the driver, have been deployed at five places in the city.
As many as 20 women police personnel have been trained for this purpose as well as in unarmed combat.