The Hindu

Joint quarterly meetings with Bangalore and Mumbai police planned

Mangalore, Nov 8: The police top brass here will liaise with their counterparts in Mumbai and to Bangalore to curb activities by criminal elements on one another’s turf.

This comes in the wake of growing instances of the involvement of people from this part of the State, especially those from Dakshina Kannada and Udupi, but presently based in Bangalore and Mumbai, in criminal activities such as dacoity and extortion.

Personnel of the District Crime Intelligence Bureau, Udupi; Special Operations Group, Dakshina Kannada; and City Crime Branch (CCB), Bangalore, will jointly take on organised crime in coastal Karnataka, and Bangalore, Ashit Mohan Prasad, Inspector-General of Police (Western Range), told The Hindu here on Wednesday.

With the Mumbai Crime Branch too being invited for the next meeting, the police here hope to ensure focused action on people based outside the State carrying out criminal activities locally, Prasad said.

The police authorities from Dakshina Kannada and Udupi recently held a meeting with personnel from the CCB, Bangalore. The main aim of this exercise, according to Prasad, was to share intelligence on anti-social elements, underworld operators and extortionists. Most of these criminals were operating in an organised network out of Bangalore and Mangalore, he said.

Detections

Even some of the recent detections made jointly by the Bangalore and Mangalore police, especially in the Chemmanur Jewellers dacoity case, clearly indicated the involvement of people from this district, Prasad said. Some common local names (of criminals) had surfaced in cases where wealthy and influential persons in Bangalore and Mangalore had received extortion calls in the recent past, Prasad said.

Some criminal elements called up the media claiming their involvement in high-profile cases such as the murder of the estate agent Subba Rao here recently. This was their method of sending an indirect message about their professed criminal strength, he said. The resultant fear psychosis would then be exploited by them to carry out nefarious activities, Prasad added.

Referring to the arrest of three youths by the city police on October 28, including two from Lucknow and one person from this region but presently based in Mumbai, for making an extortion call to a local builder, Prasad said the police in the three cities were clearly aiming to root out this development. “Crime is not confined to one place,” he said and added that the thrust of the joint efforts would be to operationalise the intelligence gathered.

The police from this part and Bangalore would meet on a quarterly basis, he said. “Besides, I am also in touch with the officials of the Mumbai Crime Branch. We will collectively work out preventive and proactive strategies to ensure that criminal activities of all types are curbed,” he said. This would also include means to deal with people who operate from foreign soil, either directly or through their cohorts, he added.