The year 2012 proved to be a good year for Coimbatore City Police with crime detection and recovery going up and the number of suicides and offences coming down. But, lives lost in road accidents were a cause for worry. In 2011, the police had registered 979 cases of property crime and detected 695 of these, showing a detection and recovery rate of 71 per cent. This year, 745 cases were reported till the third week of December of which 564 had already been detected, registering a detection rate of 76 per cent and recovery of 71 per cent.
As far as physical offences were concerned, the city witnessed a slight upward trend in murders with this year registering 25 murders (till December 18) as against the 24 reported in 2011. Injury cases in clashes witnessed a drastic fall with 398 cases in 2011 while it was 263 in 2012. Similarly, there was some respite with the number of suicides coming down to 409 in 2012 from 425 in 2011.
On the road safety front, the non-fatal accidents came down from 873 in 2011 to 848 in 2012 and even the total number of accidents came down to 1,105 in 2012 from the 1,126 of 2011. On the accident front, the number of accidents in 2012 was 257 (it was 253 in 2011) and the number of fatalities during the last four days were more.
On the traffic road rule enforcement side, police had registered 3,65,748 cases against the violators and had realised a fine of Rs 6.22 crore in 2011 whereas in 2012, the number of cases registered was 3,72,866 and the fine realised from the offenders was Rs 6.73 crore. Inspector-General of Police and Police Commissioner A.K. Viswanathan said every personnel in the force were fine-tuned to protect the lives and property of the citizens of Coimbatore. With regard to crime, he urged Coimbatoreans to extend co-operation to the police in preventing incidents of crime and also to take a vow and make a New Year resolution to abide by rules to end the loss of lives on roads.
