Bangalore Police - performance data

So, how much do you know about Police's performance. Policing is on part of infrastructure that doesn't get 'reviewed' as such. And thanks to movies and what not, our take on police is mostly based on misconpcetions, and not data.

Interest in data side of policing got sparked after I attended a talk by Mr Shankar Bidari over an year ago where he mentioned that detection rate of Bangalore police is considerably higher than that in many places in the west. He had data to back his claim, and after the meeting, like a true blue praja, I asked him for a hard copy of his speech itself. He was surprised, but nice enough to hand over whatever printed sheets he spoke from.

Here is the data he had shared (breakup of total IPC cases), till July 2008. Have requested him for current data. But look at this and comment if you happen to know benchmarks for detection rates. And yeah, a common grouse against such data is that "report rate" (percentage of crime that get reported) itself is very low in our country, and that tends to inflate the "detection ratio".

Data is data. Whether it is good or bad, depends on the benchmarks, or your judgement!