Majority of junior policemen ready to give them dope, claims YCL
Valley cops, who have been drawing a lot of flak for their failure on the law and order front, have another headache: their informers are deserting them for the Young Communist League. Valley cops stumbled upon this bitter truth when they recently found that some of their informers were not tipping them off. “Later it turned out that they had switched loyalties to the YCL,” a police official at the Metropolitan Police Crime Division (MPCD) told The Himalayan Times. MPCD officials say cops depend heavily on the informers.
“We can’t get all the information on our own because people don’t open up to us,” an official said.
Informers are motivated by several reasons. “Some of them regularly provide information about their business rivals, whereas some tip us to exact revenge on their personal or family foes,” a high-level police official at the Narcotic Drug Control Law Enforcement Unit (NDCLEU) said. But few make a living out of it. According to police officials, many work for a specific case and then go mum.
“The whole business is kept under wraps. We don’t tell it to anyone, not even to our immediate bosses,” inspector Jiban Shrestha at the MPCD said. Police officials admit that many informers are petty criminals. “We convince them to work as informers,” DSP Bikash Khanal at the NDCLEU said. Often the cops pay them from their own pockets.
The police have no clear policy about paying informers. The Police Headquarters allocates very little for offices like MPCD and NDCLEU under the different heads and the office provides cash to informers in case of big seizure or when they help net a big fish.
SSP Kuber Rana at the NDCLEU admits that they receive some cash from the headquarters under “programme budget”.
Rana, however, says all of that is not supposed to be spent on informers, as nobody knows how many of them are working under a police office. “We have to spend part of that money for training the cops and building their capacity,” he added.
Asked why YCL was poaching police informers, YCL’s Kathmandu district president Jwala said, “Not only the informers, 70 per cent of junior police officials are ready to join us. However, we have to be on our toes to ensure that informers don’t leak our information to the state.” Adapted from the himalayan times.
