LAHORE, Jan 17: The newly-appointed capital city police officer seeks help of notables as a new strategy to curb street crime.

DIG Anwar Virk said at his maiden news conference here on Wednesday the police would enlist the responsible citizens to identify criminals involved in street crime and seek necessary information about their hideouts.

The contributions of the citizens would be kept secret, he added.

“We are devising short- and long-term policies to curb street crime and crime beats are being formulated with deployment of four Muhafiz force officials with two motorcycles in each beat,” he said.

“Crime record, observations of beat officials and calls received by emergency 15 will be evaluated to examine nature of street crime in each circle besides preparing charts of each crime beat.

He said street crime, which had been the major concern of the people and being flashed in the media, was on top of his agenda and effective measures, including expansion of Muhafiz force, were being adopted.

The DIG said Muhafiz officials for each beat would be selected on merit and trained. Their meetings would be held weekly to monitor their performance and strategies to curb crime would be made after receiving feedback from the officials.

Each official would work at least for six months and show their performance, he added.

DIG Virk said the establishment of ‘rapid response centre’ was under consideration after the evaluation of crimes.

He warned the operations and investigation wings to mend their ways and not shift responsibility to each other otherwise a strict action would be taken against the irresponsible officials.

“I will personally monitor the performance of both wings and will review the accomplishment of tasks which I have given to the police to facilitate the victims,” he said.

He directed the police officers to come out of their offices and do field duty.

Mr Virk said he would also monitor work done by the SHO of the area concerned.

He told newsmen that he and DIG (operations) would hold open courts to listen to the public complainants.

The system of regular inspection of police stations was also being devised, he continued.

He told a questioner that the criminals who managed to secure bails, would be kept under surveillance so that they could not commit similar crimes again.

When asked repeatedly about the arrests of Arif Bhinder’s murderers, he said police teams had achieved some success.