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Shillong: The first woman police chief in Meghalaya took charge today.
Newly-appointed Meghalaya Director General of Police (DGP), Idashisha Nongrang today took charge of the office and underscored her commitment towards maintaining law and order, prevention and detection of crimes, and combating crimes against women among other key priorities.
The 1992 batch IPS officer, who belongs to the Assam-Meghalaya cadre, became the first woman DGP of Meghalaya after replacing Lajja R Bishnoi.
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Addressing the media, Nongrang said, “I don’t think the female DGP is any criteria or qualification for being DGP but as a female officer, as a woman, I feel very strongly that women have a very different perspective and I would try to use that perspective to ensure that women themselves feel much better and feel much safer and improve accessibility, which I know there’s a lot of room for improvement in the accessibility of the police to the public.”
Spelling out her priorities, she said, “Basic policing that is maintaining law and order, prevention and detection of crimes and of course, we would be focusing on areas in which we feel the trends are much more disturbing.”
Asserting the need to relook into the approach toward dealing with crimes against women, Nongrang said, “Despite the efforts we have been making over the years, there has been no decline, there has been in fact an increase…we haven’t been able to have the kind of results that we have been hoping for. Therefore, I feel that we need to have a relook at how we will be going about it and may rethink and rework our approach towards tackling such issues.”
Stating that intelligence would also be a focused area for her, the new DGP said, “When it comes to intelligence, we always feel the lesser the better so I would not like to comment on how we go about collecting our intelligence but rest assured that intelligence is a focus area for us and without intelligence we will not really be able to do our duties to the extent that we would like to.”
Terming the issue of drug menace as disturbing, Nongrang said Shillong was usually a transit point but now it has become a consumer and despite the seizures made police have not really been able to stop the actual supply system adding there have been commendable efforts by the anti-narcotic task force (ANTF) in a number of cases but the “deterrent factor” is not there.
She asserted the need for families to join the fight against the drug menace. “It is something, which we need to work very closely not only with the law enforcement, the other agencies that are involved in the fight against drugs but also especially with the families and the society at large. We would like to drill down to the families because one thing I have noticed about us is we would like to talk about it but we don’t really do much about it and when it comes to my family it is okay no it is not to be discussed.”
She also emphasized that bringing “misguided youth” to the right path is not just the duty of the police.
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