Delhi Police is on way to giving Scotland Yard a run for its money. Or, is it? At least, the alacrity with which it made an incident of road rage in which a café manager was crushed to death by a Jet Airways pilot on Tuesday – an open and shut case, makes it appear so.

The pilot’s car ran over the victim as he drove away after a heated argument following over their cars grazing each other. And here’s what a senior police officer of the Delhi police had to say: “It is a clear case of accident. There was no intention to kill anyone. The accused was trying to avoid a huge fight. He did not even realise he had run over the victim.” What an awfully amazing assessment of the case without losing any time or thought!

And if this was any less a display of crass (in)competence of the force, here was his colleague, an additional deputy commissioner of police (DCP) corroborating his contentions in favor of the accused. According to him, it was a minor incident and the accused accelerated his vehicle to save himself from the café manager – who was infuriated and slapping him – as a result of which the victim slipped and got crushed under the wheels. 
Spot on! This is our investigative agencies at their “erroneous best”.

Coming high on the heels of the mess that the CBI made of the Arushi murder case and the way the top brass of the Uttar Pradesh police had jumped the gun to make their claim of having solved the murder mystery barely a day after the crime, this is only an appalling addition of a feather in the cap of our police.

And who has forgotten that the same Delhi Police’s shoddy investigation had allowed the defence in the high-profile BMW hit-and-run case to establish in the court that it was a truck and not Sanjeev Nanda’s car that crushed six people? Three of those killed were policemen but even the killing of their brethren was not a reason compelling enough for Delhi Police to do a fair investigation. Like in the Jessica Lal case, it was only after the media made a hue and cry that the investigators were forced to get their acts together and Nanda was later convicted and sentenced by another court.

A fact common to all these cases is that all the accused have an influential lineage. In the latest case too, the pilot is the son of a former law secretary of the government of India. This maybe just a coincidence but the way the Delhi Police officers are talking about the incident smells foul. What is it that makes them draw such a simplistic sequence of a crime that has claimed a life? Why such a hurry? Why can’t they start doing investigation instead?

Delhi Police will do well to avoid bringing disgrace to its force. Its officers need to break the habit of giving clean chits to the accused even before the investigation begins. It needs to sit down and deliberate how to do its homework right and not get caught off guard like this again and again.