The Cop Gazette

On bookstore shelves across Mumbai and Kolkata, maybe not far from your weekly installation of Open, sit copies of Protector.

On bookstore shelves across Mumbai and Kolkata, maybe not far from your weekly installation of Open, sit copies of Protector. The Eveready-red title belongs to a two-city magazine on the police forces in Mumbai and Kolkata. The Mumbai version of the bi-monthly was launched in October, while Kolkata got its first issue of Protector last week. Published by trade magazine publishers New Media in association with local police departments, Protector is not so much ‘for the police’, as its tagline reads, but ‘by’ cops. Say you missed the details of the equipment the police have bought or security measures they’ve enforced post 26/11, it’s all there in the Nov-Dec issue on the stands in Mumbai. The language is somewhat archaic—one story refers to a morning walk as ‘the constitutional’—and it reads like a 100-page press release from law enforcement officials. However, New Media obviously has enviable access to departmental record books, which they’ve put to good use in the Kolkata edition’s cover story on the city’s police force, and the ‘Archives’ section on famous crimes. Even if the magazine doesn’t forge a readership, it has plenty of ads to survive, including a back page colour one by the most high-profile victim of 26/11, the Taj Mahal Hotel.

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