Kolkata is nation's safest city second year in a row: NCRB data

KOLKATA: Kolkata has emerged as the safest city in 2021, the second year on the trot, with the fewest cognisable offences recorded per lakh of its population, according to the just-released National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report for the year.

The Bengal capital had come out on top - or the bottom of an enviable list, whichever way one looks at it - the previous year, too.With the release of this year's figures, Kolkata has retained its position three times in the last four years: in 2018, 2020 and 2021. The exception was 2019, when NCRB claimed it hadn't received the state's data.
With a score of 103.4 (the number of cognisable offences recorded per 1 lakh people), Kolkata's latest figures are even better than last year's, when it had scored 129.5. Pune is second on this list, with a score of 256.8, followed by Hyderabad (259.9), Kanpur (336.5), Bengaluru (427.2) and Mumbai (428.4).
The bureau has compared big cities, the ones that have a population of more than two million.
The city has also achieved something that many others haven't been able to: its IPC crime rate has fallen in 2021, from 109.9 to 92.6. This is a progressive decrease. The score had been 139.5 in 2018, 141.2 in 2017 and 159.6 in 2016.
City's crime rate has been sliding for the past 7 years
Kolkata's crime rate has been sliding for the past seven years, with the total number of cases declining to just 14,591 in 2021 from 18,277 in 2020. There were 26,161 cases in 2014. The total number of IPC crimes has slid from 15, 517 in 2021 to 13,067 in 2021. There were 17,324 cases in 2019. The number of state law crimes, too, has gone down - from 2,760 in 2020 to 1,524 in 2021.
Kolkata Police commissioner Vineet Goyal attributed this to the "hard work of the officers and men of Kolkata Police and active support of the people of Kolkata." Senior officers also attributed this to the increasing thrust on technology. "Focused attention of the state government towards creating infrastructure and additional manpower, upgrade of vigilance, night policing and extensive nakas, especially in the Covid months, among other things have helped greatly in the prevention and detection of crime," said a senior detective department officer.
The numbers indicate that the city has fared well in containing violent crime, registering only 45 murder cases and 135 cases of attempt to murder in 2021, compared with the 53 and 121 cases reported in 2018.
Kolkata also saw 11 rapes in 2021, equal to its 2020, but fewer than the 14 rapes of 2018 and 15 of 2017. There were, though, 10 cases of kidnapping for ransom in the city, just behind Delhi (17) and Chennai (16).
One area of concern - for the second successive year - was the huge number of "hurt cases" (crimes that caused grievous injury). The city, yet again, topped the national figures with 4,512, behind Delhi's 5,200.