Written by: Express News Service
3 min readMumbaiJun 2, 2009 11:40 PM IST
First published on: Jun 2, 2009 at 11:40 PM IST
The Mumbai Police’ specialized Cyber Crime police station is finally up and running. Located on the first floor of the Bandra-Kurla Complex police station building,this new dedicated police station,the first-of-its-kind in the state,was launched on May 30.
“The Cyber Crime Police Station is now operational. It will be in a position to register First Information Reports on its own and investigate cases. It will cater to all offences taking place in cyber space and all cases related to the Information Technology Act. The police station will register all cyber crime cases taking place across the city,and will also deal with tracking the source of terror e-mails,” said Additional Commissioner of Police (Crime) Deven Bharti. The recruitments for the police station were finalized following polls in the city,and a specially trained team of over 50 policemen has been selected for the new venture.
“The police station will be headed by an Assistant Commissioner of Police,and we have assigned staff strength keeping in mind the frequency of cyber crimes. The city is divided into five police regions,and the new police station has a police inspector each for monitoring cases in all five regions. The staff at the new police station has been specially trained and their training will continue from time to time in collaboration with private agencies such as NASSCOM,” Bharti added.
The police station is only the third of its kind in the country,with the other two being in the Information Technology hubs of Bangalore and Hyderabad. It will function directly under the Deputy Commissioner of Police (Preventive),and under the supervision of the Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime). An existing Cyber Crime Investigation Cell of the Mumbai Police Crime Branch investigates cyber offences,but the FIRs in these cases are registered in different local police stations depending on the scene of the offence.
The police had initially planned that as many as four Assistant Commissioners of Police (ACPs) would be posted at the new Cyber Crime police station,since only officers of the rank of ACP and above were allowed to register and investigate offences under the IT Act. However,the decision to have only one ACP heading the police station was taken after a recent amendment to the IT Act allowing officers of the rank of Police Inspectors to register and investigate cyber offences.
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