Requisition of vehicles by cops
The harassing device must be done away with
HOW indiscriminate and pervasive the practice of the police requisitioning private transports has become can be quantified by a simple statistic: as many as 300 vehicles reportedly are commandeered on a daily basis! What was perceived to be a contingency measure to meet an exigency when the police felt an urgent need to replenish its fleet of transports has now become a daily affair. Why this must become a permanent feature of logistical dependence on privately-owned vehicles?
The basic question to ask is: Why a metropolitan police force entrusted with onerous responsibilities should be so poorly provided with transports that they will have to requisition vehicles from the street and ride them in wanton disregard for the owner's natural right to use and his convenience. It seems to us that successive governments having failed to cater for a basic logistical requirement of the law enforcers, the police have cashed in on the rule for vehicle requisition making overuse of the same in the process. The whole range of law enforcement authorities -- the DMP, Rab, prosecution department, mobile courts under DC's office and several other government agencies -- have use of them.
The rules are that the transport will have to be returned to the owner within seven days of commandeering and that compensation and meal allowance will have to be given on daily basis but these are flouted accentuating the agonies of the owner and the driver. Sometimes, on duty, these vehicles were even damaged or burnt with the owners getting no compensation whatsoever. The practice has also spawned corruption.
Nothing like discontinuing this practice all at once. But short of it, a gradualist approach may be taken to phase it out in a time-bound fashion with a programme to make the police force self-contained in terms of its pool of transports. Meanwhile, the high-handed and random nature of requisitioning must stop and where resorted to, very selectively at that, adequate compensation and allowances must be granted to the owners, with costs of repair if any entailed.
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