Be wary of fake, 'well-meaning' policemen

The Sunday’s crimes involving fake cops fleeing with citizens’ valuables have driven panic among Bangaloreans at a time when even authorised police personnel have increased the frequency of stopping people to check their credentials.

In various parts of the city, police—law & order as well as traffic—have been stopping people to check vehicle documents or for drunken driving, but the Sunday incidents, wherein miscreants posing as policemen robbed citizens of jewellery at five different locations across the city, will force them to look at even the real policemen with a shade of suspicion.

Murali Krishna, a resident of Rajajinagar, who rides from Ulsoor to home about 12.30 am after work at a private firm, says: “In the past few days, while returning home in the nights, I used to feel really safe at the sight of night beat constables. But now, I will think twice about whether they are really real or not.”

The general feeling is that if a group of fake policemen could fool people at will on Sunday morning, it would be all that more easy for those very ‘policemen’ to strike at night—even attack or kill people by first stopping them on the pretext of checking their credentials.

Several Bangaloreans that dna spoke to felt that when the city has been closing down early because of police worrying over late night deadlines posing law & order problems, here is a group of people posing as cops and cheating people in broad daylight, almost right under the nose of the real policemen.

Nihal Rai, a resident of Malleswaram, narrated an incident when he was stopped by a lone night patrol policeman recently in the lane next to Cauvery Theatre near the Hyundai Trident showroom.

“I was stopped by this law and order cop, who demanded to see my bike papers, which was fine because there are bike thefts happening in the city. But what I felt strange was that this cop was not wearing his hat and something about him told me to demand seeing his ID card or even his service number. He refused to do so, saying that I did not have any authority to ask him for all that. That’s when I realised he may be a fake.”

Nihal says the “cop” vanished when he asked him to wait until he checked with “someone I know at the Vyalikaval police station”. “I am quite sure he was a fake policeman, because normally there are two constables on a night beat, never one,” he says, adding that surely there may be a lot more fake policemen on the city roads, waiting to pounce on gullible citizens in the city.