The year when Uber rape case brought the spotlight back on women’s safety, the Capital registered nearly 500 more rape cases than 2013 — a 31.70 per cent jump over the preceding year.
Statistics reveal that from 1,571 rape cases registered in 2013, the number grew to 2,069 in 2014. A rise was also seen in the number of molestation cases which went up by 25 per cent to 4,179 from 3,345 the year before.
The overall crime rate in the city in 2014 too shot up to almost double the corresponding number in 2013. It also crossed the one lakh mark for the first time in the city’s history.
At the annual police press conference here on Friday, Commissioner B.S. Bassi revealed that a whopping 1,47,230 cases were registered till December 15 last year, nearly twice the 73,902 cases registered till the same date in 2013.
A break up of the 1.47 lakh cases thus registered illustrates that on an average as many as 421 crimes are reported in the city every day.
He attributed the staggering rise to greater emphasis on “truthful registration” of cases under his leadership. In other major crimes, the number of murders was 561 in 2014, compared with 486 the year before.
It was during the year that several major robberies such as the Rs. 7.7-crore one in Lajpat Nagar and the still unsolved ATM robbery-cum-murder case in Kamla Nagar were reported.
But with only 29.5 per cent of the cases solved in the entire year, it seems investigation has not kept pace with the registration. There is a dip in this figure as in 2013, 48.86 per cent of the registered cases were solved. Calculation in absolute terms establishes that a total of 36,109 were solved in 2013. The number went up by nearly 7,000 to 43,433 till December 15.
Evading a pointed reply to a question related to the progress of investigation in the Sunanda Pushkar death case, which continues to remain a mystery, Mr. Bassi said the police had done “whatever was needed”.
