New-age policeman should be well trained, professional: PM

Favouring a new-age policeman who is well trained, more professional and suitably empowered, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today said Central and state governments need to take quick action to strengthen policing at the grassroots level.

"The police station has to be the fulcrum around which this needs to take place. A large increase in the number of police stations along with raising the strength of police stations has to be undertaken," he told a conference here of Directors General and Inspectors General of police organised by Intelligence Bureau.
  
The PM said the country needs far higher number of policemen to improve the present low police- population ratio of 145 per lakh people and as a first move, urgent steps should be taken to fill up the large number of vacancies that exist at various levels in the police.

"But increasing numbers alone will not be enough. We need a new-age policeman who is more professional, better- motivated, suitably empowered, well-trained, and one who places greater emphasis on technology for investigation and other tasks," he said.

Singh said emphasis should be on capacity building from the police station level itself, so that the police is better equipped.

"Each police station should aim at being self-sufficient and needs to be given the required resources in terms of anti-riot gear, better weapons, the nucleus of a mobile forensic unit and be connected to a networked criminal data base management system," he said.