NO Arrest before Investigation – Delhi Police circular

Delhi Police Commisioner’s Circular (No Arrest without Investigation or Sanction from ACP/DCP)

Commisioner of Police, Delhi has issued a circular to all police stations in Delhi;
The instructions in this circular are:

1. Full investigations before any arrest in case of Indian Penal Code sections 498a & 406
2. Sanction of ACP required for arrest of prime accused, sanction of DCP required for arrest of other co-accused.

This circular is following the Supreme court Judgement as mentioned in this blog: http://at498a.blogspot.com/2008/04/arrest-guidelines-in-case-of.html

It seems like common sense that police should arrest only after investigations and prima-facie proof (this happens even in murder cases!), thus its actually humbling to note that it needed such circulars to put a check to harassment of lakhs of husband’s families, by way of false cases by their wives. Yes statistics from NCRB(National Crime Research Bureau) says that every year around 500 children and 5000 senior citizens get arrested because of false cases under IPC 498a, 406, Dowry Prohibition Act, etc.

Anyway this is the third of such similar circulars from delhi police, the first two are blogged at http://ipc498a.wordpress.com/2008/03/29/hyd-comm-of-police-no-arrest-without-permission-of-dcp-in-498a-cases-2002. This circular will become the third from delhi police(apart from which we have a similar hyderabad police circular & and supreme court judgement, which is fetaured in the post: http://at498a.blogspot.com/2008/04/arrest-guidelines-in-case-of.html)

We, at Save Indian Family, are slowly unearthing similar circulars from other states and will move on to the next step of enforcing them on police by sustained RTI cmapiagns which will ask compliance reports with respect to these circulars every 6 months from all police stations of a state(we will start with cities of Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad and Pune).

We will be filing a writ petition to get the Delhi High court’s order directing the police to investigate all the pending and new cases under IPC sections 498a&406(and to comply with the other particulars of this police circular). Later we will be asking the individual police stations in delhi about the compliance to this circular, by Right to Information Act every 6 months or so, on a sustained basis.