The city police say they will be working towards bringing down the response time of their patrol vehicle Garuda to 7-8 minutes.
Speaking at a programme organised to flag off 25 new Maruti Suzuki Ertiga vehicles, which have been added to the existing fleet of Garuda and mobile Police Control Room (PCR) vehicles, City Police Commissioner A. Subramanyeshwara Rao said he would work towards ensuring a response time faster than the international standard.
The police plan to deploy a total of 40 patrol vehicles in the city. While the geographic area under the jurisdiction of the city police is 80 sq. km, each vehiclewill be given an area of responsibility of 2 sq. km. Though the travel time within such a radius will not be more than five minutes, the time spent on the control room personnel receiving the 100 call, identifying the nearest patrol vehicle and contacting it should not take more than two to three minutes, he said.
The international standard for response time of patrol vehicles is 10 minutes. The average response time off 911, the emergency service in the United States, is 10 minutes, while the fastest is nine. “In Mysuru, we can do it in 7-8 minutes. That is our goal,” Mr. Rao said. However, the city police will need three to six months to meet this goal as personnel need to be trained, trials run and obstacles dealt with, he said.
Mr. Rao added that the city police are facing a shortage of patrol vehicle drivers, but the plan is to rope in 100 to 120 drivers from the Home Guards after obtaining government permission.
Before the addition of the 25 new vehicles, the police had 32 patrol vehicles.
