Police have hit upon a novel idea to add teeth to night patrolling in the city — deployment of officers in areas outside their jurisdiction.

The move, senior cops believe, would infuse alertness among officers and subsequently help to curb crime. The people involved would have to patrol relatively unknown areas of the city and places generally ignored by the existing cops in that particular locality.

“The interchange of police station area jurisdictions is a good idea to control crime. There have been complaints that many station house officers (SHOs) do not lead the patrol teams during night and leave the job to their juniors. The junior officers, too, take things lightly and the patrolling isn’t conducted properly,” said Patna senior superintendent of police (SSP) Manu Maharaaj.

He said: “We would ask a patrolling team of one police station to suddenly go to a different area for the night patrol. For example, cops belonging to the Pirbahore police station might be asked to go to the Patrakar Nagar police station area and conduct patrolling. The ones at Patrakar Nagar could be asked to go to the Alamganj area.”

“A patrol team of a particular police station knows his area well but gets complacent after sometime. A take-it-easy attitude creeps in and most places are not checked or are ignored. A new team in the area will act differently. Since they do not know the area well, they would check most places,” the SSP added.

Sources said another motive behind the initiative was to boost performance of the SHOs.