Tamil Nadu   

Chained to various factors Law and order

The spate of chain-snatching incidents in the densely populated residential localities of Adambakkam, Pazhavanthangal and Nanganallur has left residents in a state of shock and law-enforcers clueless. What has bothered the police is not the frequency of chain-snatching incidents or the quantity of gold jewellery snatched from helpless women victims, but the ease with which offenders manage to vanish after the crime.

In private, police officials admit that incidents of chain-snatching in the Madipakkam and St. Thomas Mount Police Ranges are not new. Chain-snatching touched such a high in 2005 that civic groups in the eastern sector, Nanganallur, issued a warning to residents, particularly women, to be alert while travelling alone.

Top sources in the Police department said there was a clear, visible pattern to the crimes. Invariably, the offenders were motorcycle-borne youths and almost all victims were travelling alone and the scene of crime was desolate spot, where help would come only long after the culprits made their vanishing act.

Last year, when the Pazhavanthangal police cracked a case pertaining to a series of mobile phone snatchings, they were shocked to note that the offenders were college students who committed the crimes purely “for the fun of it.”

That case was a serious challenge to the police as they were confronted with criticisms that they could crack cases involving neither habitual offenders nor first-time offenders.

On the reasons for Pazhavanthangal, Nanganallur and Adambakkam being most vulnerable spots for chain-snatching incidents, police said that unlike other important suburban pockets, they were purely residential pockets that did not witness a floating population. In the absence of an efficient public transport, people had to walk through fairly long stretches of desolate spots from railway stations and bus stops to their homes, inviting trouble from miscreants.

There are a few hundred streets in Alandur Municipality, under whose jurisdiction the three vulnerable spots are located. The Adambakkam and Pazhavanthangal police stations with limited manpower could hardly cover all localities round the clock.

Some years ago, the Pazhavanthangal police station’s system of using volunteers of Friends of Police was adopted as a model concept to replicate elsewhere.

Members of civic groups in Nanganallur, who pioneered the concept of late night community patrolling, said policemen of St. Thomas Mount district were credited with the honour of nabbing the elusive bureau-puller and the grille offenders after several months of investigations.

Their inability to curb the menace of chain-snatchers only pointed out to chinks in their armour. Chain-snatchers struck mostly in the daytime. And so, an enhanced focus on community policing, an increased vigil from the law-enforcers’ side and sensitising women and their relatives to the need for safe travel could bring down the crime rate, or at least, the incidents of chain-snatching, the civic groups felt.

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