Pending cases in city police stations cut to one-ninth

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The number of cases pending investigations in police stations has been brought down to 4,164 from a staggering 35,000 over the last year and a half.

With the reduction in the number of pending cases, harassment of people has also been reduced significantly, since case investigators earlier often kept cases pending just to collect bribes from both the complainants and the accused threatening both parties with possible submissions of biased reports.

Pending cases had reached the staggering number also due to the police department being bogged down with too many duties simultaneously during partisan governments’ regimes, like breaking up hartals, maintaining law and order at opposition demonstrations or other political programmes, and providing security for VIPs all at the same time, said sources in the police department.

Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP) authorities reduced the number of pending cases to one ninth of what it had been in just 16 months under a crash programme, the sources said.

According to DMP, 35,203 cases had been pending with 33 police stations, investigations of 31,039 of which were completed between February 2007 and June 2008.

Among the cases that were investigated, final reports were submitted in around 10,000 of them while in the rest of them charge sheets were submitted.

Now the number of pending cases stands at 4,164 which are being investigated by around 500 investigators, mainly sub-inspectors (SI), each of whom is tasked with investigating 8.33 cases on an average.

With around 2,000 cases being filed every month on an average in city police stations, the DMP authorities directed its investigation officers to complete investigations of at least six cases a month.

“If an investigation officer fails to complete investigations of the cases within the stipulated time due to valid reasons, he or she must explain the reasons to the deputy commissioner concerned,” DMP Commissioner Naim Ahmed told The Daily Star on Thursday.

Before the strict expediting of investigations, an SI of a large DMP station in a crime prone area of the capital was likely to be assigned with investigations of as many as 50 cases at a time, although the Police Regulation of Bengal (PRB), a colonial era law enforcing guideline, recommends a maximum of eight cases for an SI to investigate at a time.

Burdened with the huge work load, SIs in police stations used to appoint people from outside the department, who are widely known as ‘case writers’, to write case diaries or case investigation reports, although the practice is illegal.

Rule 68 of the Police Regulation of Bengal states that none other than the investigation officer of a case, the officer-in-charge of the respective police station, their superior officers supervising the case, and court officials may see the content of a case diary.

There are even instances of case investigators submitting charge sheets against accused persons without even visiting crime scenes or places of occurrence (PO) as they call it, or without visiting permanent addresses of accused persons, although both are mandatory by law.

The ‘case writers’ appointed by SIs used to visit crime scenes and write case diaries which had every possibility of being biased, since they also used to double as bribe negotiators between the corrupt SIs and the accused. The accused often used to be acquitted by courts due to ‘flawed’ charge sheets, said the DMP boss.

A significant portion of the bribe money used to go to the pockets of the ‘case writers’, who sometimes used to collect bribes from the victims of crimes too, threatening them with unfavourable investigation reports if they would not pay, the DMP boss added.

“We have removed all writers from police stations, the investigation officers will have to write case diaries themselves from now on,” DMP Commissioner Naim Ahmed told The Daily Star.

“We have already sacked a good number of investigators who had submitted charge sheets without visiting places of occurrences,” Naim added. He however could not instantly give the number of sacked personnel.

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