Lapses in field-level traffic enforcement

Sir,

This is to bring to notice a serious breakdown in field-level traffic enforcement across Mysuru. At multiple traffic islands, Police personnel are routinely found parked on their motorcycles, scrolling through mobile phones instead of performing active junction management.

This is not a harmless lapse — it is a direct dereliction of core operational duties and a violation of fundamental enforcement protocols.

Modern intersection management demands uninterrupted visual scanning, conflict-point mapping, queue-length assessment, pedestrian-gap evaluation and rapid manual override whenever signal cycles fail. A distracted officer cannot perform even a fraction of these functions. As a result, lane discipline breaks down, pedestrian risk escalates and traffic congestion worsens.

What is worse, such scenes have become a subject of open public mockery. This ridicule severely damages the institutional credibility of the Police Department — credibility that sincere and hard-working officers have built through years of disciplined service.

The Police Department must enforce strict accountability: random supervisory inspections, duty-performance metrics, CCTV-based compliance scoring and zero-tolerance for mobile-phone misuse at junctions. Without systemic correction, Mysuru’s traffic grid will continue to suffer avoidable failures.

– K.V. Chandramouli, Mysuru, 20.11.2025

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This post was published on November 28, 2025 5:55 pm