The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh News : Law & order: Police clueless on tackling hoax bomb calls

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Saturday, Jul 19, 2008
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Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh

Law & order: Police clueless on tackling hoax bomb calls

Spurt in these calls is not only inconveniencing the people but also keeping the force on tenterhooks, writes Marri Ramu

From most intriguing murders to complicated terrorist modules, police have busted many cases. Still it is a paradox that they could not catch a single person in any of the hundreds of hoax bomb call cases reported in the past two years.

After the city witnessed two deadly terror attacks, police are forced to check the targeted places irrespective of the motive behind false alarm. However, the spurt in hoax bomb calls is resulting in inconvenience to thousands of people and loss of their precious time. Even services of bomb disposal squads and sniffer dogs, to be utilised in emergency situations, too are going waste. Since prevention of these calls was beyond their control, the only option for the police was to track the caller and punish the accused to ensure such incidents did not recur. But it was easier said than done.

Pranksters used to ring up the landline phones. As most of these phones had no caller identification instruments, the investigators were clueless to proceed with the investigation. That forced police to undertake campaign on the need to affix caller ID instrument to check anonymous calls. Based on the numbers displayed on the phone, police arrested the callers in two cases. But soon the mischief mongers became cleverer and began depending on coin telephone boxes to raise false alarm.

This again brought the situation back to square one leaving no leads for the police. Having explored all options, police officials feel that coin telephone boxes with an inbuilt digital camera to click pictures of the callers could be one solution. They say the proposal should be viewed as part of a broader security consciousness campaign to prevent future terror attacks.

Security measure

A digital camera that can store pictures of callers for 24 hours would be useful. As coin telephone boxes are available at every place, installation of cameras would send across the security concerns loud and clear.

The proposal is no doubt helpful but the ground reality is different. So primitive is our telephone line system that calls made to the control room from landline phones of Cyberabad police commissionerate land at the control room of Hyderabad police commissionerate.

The question is when the officials are not improving the system of routing the calls to the control room concerned, would they install digital cameras in coin telephone boxes?

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