Taking a serious note of the recent spate of incidents where miscreants deliberately take up quarrels with motorists in an attempt to extort money, the city police have now started opening rowdy-sheets against such miscreants.
“There seems to be a new modus operandi where miscreants are harassing motorists by staging accident-like situations and trying to extort money in the garb of road rage. In many cases they have also assaulted motorists and damaged their vehicles. I have directed our officers to open rowdy-sheets against all such accused,” said City Police Commissioner B. Dayananda.
“Road rage, showing aggression and expressing insensitive behaviour, amounts to rowdy behaviour. Threatening, intimidating, and harassing road users for personal gain not only attracts penal action but also needs constant monitoring,” he added.
Opening rowdy-sheets against such accused will help the police keep surveillance and monitor their activities. This will also help them to summon these accused to the station and question them about their activities regularly.
Officials have already initiated action and have opened a few rowdy-sheets against the accused in such deliberate road-rage cases reported recently. “We have followed the guidelines issued by the High Court of Karnataka,” a senior official said.
The accused, mostly goons from local areas, hit upon this modus operandi to intimidate and threaten owners of cars to extort money staging an accident-like incident. Though some of them succeeded in intimidating and extorting money, the modus operandi started catching on, especially in the outer zones.
However, many victims started posting dashcam videos of these incidents on social media tagging the city police and seeking action, leading to cases and arrests, a senior police officer said.
The recent spate of such incidents and dashcam videos being posted on social media, had raised safety concerns and had prompted residents welfare associations (RWAs) to issue advisories to their members to install dashcams in their cars, install Suraksha app, not to venture out of the vehicles in case of any eventualities and dial 112 for emergency response help.
Recent incidents of deliberate road rage:
August
Two persons arrested for an incident of road rage in Whitefield. The duo took up a quarrel deliberately with a techie couple in the car, vandalised the car when the couple refused to get down and even threatened to kill them. The victims uploaded their dashcam video, which went viral prompting the police to take action.
July
Four bike-borne youth take objection to a car honking, seeking a clear way, when they were driving in a zig-zag fashion on Gunjur Main Road. They damaged the car, broke the windshield and tried to pull out the occupants of the car, even as the car driver reversed and fled from the scene. Dashcam video uploaded on social media went viral. The Varthur police arrested all four in a day.
A woman software engineer returning home on her two-wheeler from work was harassed by a gang who stalked her and demanded her contact number in Peenya.
