Street crime dropped in two months, claim police

LAHORE: DIG Operations Muhammad Waqas Nazir has said that under the supervision of Lahore Capital City Police Officer B.A Nasir, Lahore police is introducing an effective mechanism and modern reforms to curb crime in the City. Institutional structure of different units of Lahore police is being strengthened to improve the overall performance of the department. He said special teams had been constituted at the police station level for the arrest of proclaimed offenders while the performance of Dolphin Squad and Police Response Unit had been revamped.

The street crime ratio during the months of November and December decreased to 10 per cent whereas street crime in top 30 crime areas of the City also decreased to 12 per cent as a result of the reforms-based measures adopted by Lahore police.

The DIG Operations said that Lahore police would meet the expectations. He said he himself was monitoring the campaign against crime. CCPO B.A Nasir chairs meetings regularly to review the overall performance of the police officers. Meanwhile, Lahore police have issued facts and figures regarding their performance regarding eradication of crime in 2018. According to Lahore police, they arrested 79,089 criminals involved in different crimes in 2018. Police formulated special strategy to stop the incidents of dacoity, car stealing and car snatching which showed good results and the incidents of car stealing in the year 2018 were 28 per cent less than the incidents in the previous year. Similarly, a decrease of 33 pc in the incidents of car snatching as well as 12 per cent in the dacoity incidents was seen. Police arrested 2,348 members of 987 dacoit gangs and recovered more than Rs 156 million from them. The money was returned to its owners by police. Moreover, 2418 cases were traced during investigation against the criminals.

During a grand action against illegal weapons in the City, police arrested 5,290 criminals and registered 5,247 cases against them in different police stations. Police also seized 46 Kalashnikovs, 342 rifles, 249 guns, 4,566 pistols, 5 carbines, 35 daggers and thousands of bullets from them. During action against drug peddlers, police arrested 7,205 criminals and seized more than 49kg heroin, more than 2001kg charas, more than 69kg opium and 87,938 bottles of liquor.

Similarly, in 2018, police arrested 5,862 criminals involved in gambling and registered 1,122 cases against them while more than Rs 5.4 million as stake money was seized. In a campaign against brothels, police arrested 2,118 criminals and registered 552 cases against them.