Any landlord who fails to submit information about their tenants within March 15 would be held responsible for any crime committed by lodgers inside their house, DMP Commissioner Asaduzzaman Miah has warned.
“If someone [landlord] does not provide information to the DMP on time, then they will be held responsible if it was later found that criminals were residing at their house without the concerned officials being informed,” the DMP boss told a press conference yesterday.
“Those who did not get a [tenant database] form will have to contact their respective police stations for it,” he said.
If any tenant left a house, the owners would have to collect a new form for the next tenants and inform the police officials of the respective beat, Asaduzzaman said.
Assuring that neither the information provided in the forms would be disclosed nor the information providers be harassed, the DMP commissioner said the information would be stored as both soft and hard copies in the tenant database.
Depending on the area and its population density, police stations in Dhaka have set up three to nine units to work in this regard, while the Dhaka Metropolitan Police has also created 287 beats.
DMP sources said local tenant information would be collected and maintained by the city’s respective police stations and shared through a central DMP database. The information would be stored categorised under respective neighbourhoods.
A pilot database is now running at the DMP HQ and would later be introduced to police stations as well, the sources said.
The initiative to create a tenant database was taken by the DMP Headquarters in the past, but the process did not success then due to several reasons.
The efforts were revived recently after the Counter-terrorism and Transnational Crime Unit of police raided two houses in Badda and Mohammadpur to recover explosives and arrested Ansarullah Bangla Team members earlier this month.
According to section 42 of the code of criminal procedure, every citizen must help the police for government or investigation work. Under this section, police can seek information from anyone and citizens must cooperate. If necessary, the police can also take action under this section.
