Over 15,000 police personnel, 130 police stations and the reputation of being one of the modernised police forces of the State — despite all this, Chennai City Police does not have a website of its own.
This is even as the city police in Coimbatore, the second largest city in the State, has an interactive website where denizens can write in their complaints via email.
According to city police sources, an official website for the Greater Chennai Police and active five years ago but was shut down due to lack of maintenance. “Later, a link for Chennai City Police was created and added to the Tamil Nadu Police website >www.tnpolice.gov.in but that also became defunct.
Therefore, no there is no trace of the Chennai City Police online,” said a police officer attached to the administrative wing.
However, the city’s traffic police have two active websites >www.chennaitrafficpolice.in and >www.echallan.net and also an active Facebook page with over 43,000 likes. The page is regularly followed by Chennaites for its updates on city traffic situation and accidents and has many useful contributions from users in the form of comments.
The latest effort to retrieve the city police website was during the tenure of ADGP J.K. Tripathy, when he was the city police commissioner. “He led a team including the Deputy Commissioner, Central Crime Branch and Assistant Commissioner, Public Relations, who were in the process of developing a new site. The work was almost 70 percent complete before it came to a halt with the Commissioner’s sudden transfer,” the officer added.
A website for the city police, where denizens can email their complaints and grievances, has become quite a necessity.
The experience of Radhika (name changed), a 42-year-old resident of Medavakkam, who lost a whopping Rs. 26 lakh in 11 installments last year in a Nigerian scam, is a case in point.
As she did not know how to go about lodging an online cheating complaint, she browsed the internet and came across the official website of CBCID, Tamil Nadu Police.
She wrote an email with her grievance to a given ID in the site. Days later, someone in the wing directed the mail to the Central Crime Branch of the city police and in turn, a policeman contacted the woman on her mobile number and advised her to lodge a complaint in person at the Commissionerate which she later did.
The process would have been far simpler had the city police itself had a website.
While the facility whereby the issue of an FIR online, as once promised by the city police, seems ages away, netizens and the youth in the city look forward to at least a basic website which enables communication with the force.
