ART of policing: Team of 5 Gurugram cops cracks 15 hit-&-runs in 6 months

GURUGRAM: A broken headlight, pipes protruding from a truck’s carriage, the name of a bakery embossed on a van.
A team of five policemen trained in spotting blink-and-you-miss-it details like these on CCTV film has in six months cracked 15 “blind” hit-and-run cases.
Set up this March, the dedicated Accident Response Team (ART) is the only such specialised unit in Haryana Police. The ART members, all Gurugram Police personnel, have undergone extensive training in scanning CCTV footage.
The mandate of the ART, which is headed by a sub-inspector, is to probe only accident cases, many of which remain unsolved or see the accused get away due to lack of witnesses and evidence. The ART is the brainchild of DCP (Manesar) Varun Singla, who lost five relatives to a road accident in 2013. “I understand the pain families affected by accidents feel,” said Singla.
ART helps victims get compensation
DCP (Manesar) Varun Singla, the brain behind the initiative, said the ART also does the painstaking paperwork that helps victims claim compensation. The objective of setting up the unit, he said, was also to act as a deterrent because anyone driving rashly will know the ART will come after them.
One of the first cases this unit took up was an accident that happened on March 23 night when a 12-year-old boy injured in a hit-and-run in Pataudi died on the way to hospital. The team found CCTV feed from a camera installed outside a school near the accident site and zeroed in on a truck that had passed the area around the same time.
The numberplate was not legible because it was dark. But the cargo provided some clues, The ART inferred they needed to look for a truck carrying sewage pipes. “We searched all factories in the area that make such pipes and questioned their employees. When we were done with all pipe manufacturers in Gurugram, some of our officers travelled to adjoining Rewari and showed the truck’s footage to factory workers there. One of the manufacturers identified the truck. They shared the details of the vehicle and its owner. The driver was arrested in a couple of days,” said sub-inspector Harpal, who leads the ART.
The leads didn’t always come from scanning CCTV footage. There was good, old-fashioned sleuthing too. In June, a 32-year-old technician of a leading automobile company died after being hit by a van on the Delhi-Gurugram expressway in Narsinghpur. When the ART took up the probe, it found there was no camera that was focused on the accident site. The technician was on a two-wheeler that the truck had rammed into.
“We questioned a number of people who had seen the accident from a distance. No one had jotted down the number of the van, but some of them said it was ferrying bakery items,” said Harpal. “So, we scanned CCTV footage from nearby areas for a van with bakery items and found a van that had the name of a baker on it. We questioned the company officials, and the vehicle and its driver were eventually traced,” Harpal added.
In another case of hit and run in Farukhnagar, the only clue the cops had was a piece of broken headlight at the accident spot. They deduced it belonged to a truck. All police checkposts in the vicinity were alerted. The vehicle with a broken headlight was spotted near a toll plaza on KMP Expressway, two and half hours from the accident spot.
Investigations in hit-and-run cases also involve filling up an exhaustive form, which includes the most minute details of an accident spot. Officers in the team need to note down details such as the position of the vehicle during the accident, position of the victim, the lane on which the crash took place, the width of the road, the impact on traffic and other circumstantial evidence. Some of this evidence becomes key to facilitating compensation for the victim’s family.
“The investigating officer is required to submit all these details in court. On the basis of these, compensation is awarded. There have been many cases where the victims’ families have not been able to get compensation because of the lack of such minute details,” said Singla.
“It’s not just catching the accused, ensuring the affected families get compensation is also part of our job. For that, we need to record each and every detail, even the ones that may seem unimportant,” said the DCP.
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