The city and its suburbs in the last few months witnessed sporadic incidents of men impersonating as police personnel in civil dress. And, among the victims are women and senior citizens.
The modus operandi of these gangsters is they target women or senior citizens walking alone and introduce themselves as policemen on deployment to prevent property crimes.
The personnel also used to advise their prospective targets not to wear gold jewellery as robbery and chain snatching were high in the area.
The impersonators offer to help the victims remove the jewellery and pack it in a piece of paper or cloth. At the time of packing, the impersonators comfortably change the packet and send the victim home with a packet containing just stones. There was even an incident of impersonators posing as IT officials taking away valuables from the house of a cotton merchant recently. They often look for properties located in remote locations and in places that do not have CCTV cameras.
The victims will realise that they were duped only on opening the packet.
To prevent recurrence of such offences, the police have prepared sketches of the suspects in incidents that are reported. These sketches are with the special teams probing such cases.
The public should be fearless and ask for identity cards if the personnel are not in uniform, says an Inspector who investigated one of the cases.
A senior city police official added that police personnel in their regular roll calls (attendance meetings) at the stations were never briefed to offer such help or conduct themselves in such a fashion to assist the public. Hence, the public can straight away refuse to entertain such advices from persons claiming to be police personnel.
When they come across such suspicious persons, they should alert the police control room by dialing 100 or the nearest jurisdiction police station to apprehend them, he appealed.
Seven cases were reported this year in city police limits and another half-a-dozen cases in rural police limits.
Special teams have been formed to crack these. Cases have been registered by invoking the provisions of Section 415 to 420 of Indian Penal Code, the officer added.
(Reporting by
V.S. Palaniappan)
