Let’s Try ‘Community Policing’ - The Easier Way to Prevent Crime

‘Community Policing’ could help lower crime rate in India where manpower shortage in the police force is chronic.

Foolproof Policing

• Efficient policing, an important part of crime prevention strategy very weak in terms of understaffed police stations
• Need to focus on community policing, facilitating interaction and cooperation between police and people
• Need to find out ways of tackling crime in intelligent and economical ways
• Parental intervention needed to shield children from cyber crime
• Unreasonable to expect police to guard us all the time due to their preoccupation with guarding the VIPs

In the previous part of this series on the crime scene in India, I cited official statistics from the National Crime Record Bureau’s (NCRB) annual publication, Crime in India, and rang an alarm bell that we were on the verge of a dangerous situation. I specifically referred to the 6 % rise during last year in the overall crime rate, viz., all cognizable offences per 100,000 of the population.

Whenever we, as individuals, are confronted with a problem and pose it to a friend or an elder for some advice and solace, we are invariably told that it is all in the mind! This is very true of crime and its perception by senior citizens, women and children -- categories which need the greatest assurance of safety, and this has to come from the police.

Community Policing

Guidance on fundamentals of self-care against victimization is the first step to evolving a crime prevention strategy. It is in this vital role that many police agencies fail. The Indian Police is no exception. Either police stations are understaffed and there is no one there to receive a complain, or police top brass are too remote to escalate a genuine problem such as bullying by anti-social elements or too many burglaries in the same locality.

This is why senior police officers will have to be accessible to a citizen or a group to ensure quick responses to the community. This incidentally is the basic component of what is referred to loosely as ‘community policing’, which contemplates a dynamic police-community partnership and facilitates a two-way communication.

In some U.S. cities there are mini police stations (equivalent to our police outposts) which are manned and operated by local citizens.  Also, experiments such as Citizen Watch programmes have helped in many places to supplement police resources.

Situational Crime Prevention

I can cite the research of two eminent professors – Ron Clarke of Rutgers University in the US and Larry Sherman of Cambridge University (UK) -- with great confidence. The former’s situational crime prevention studies are a landmark by themselves. Their emphasis is on ‘target hardening’, which basically aims at making the job of the offender a lot more difficult than it is perceived.

Prominent among the many studies undertaken by Prof Clarke related to London’s Underground train system which was being devastated by vandalism and ticketless travel. The aim of any crime prevention strategy will have to be one of reducing the opportunity available to a potential offender.

Evidence Based Policing

Situational crime prevention will have to be studied alongside ‘evidence based policing’, an area that has produced enormous practical material to the benefit of policemen. Prof Larry Sherman has pioneered most of the research in this area, including the one in respect of ‘hot spots’, viz., exact public places where crime incidence is rampant.

Drawing from the analogy of medicine, which has reached the current state of sophistication and reliability, through experiments over a century, Prof Sherman’s emphasis on “triple-T”, viz., targeting, testing and tracking, has given a lot of food for thought to agencies looking for how to combat crime in the most intelligent and economical way.

Women’s Safety

There are two areas which cry for major attention when we talk of crime prevention. The focus first should be on how to reduce a citizen’s risk of bodily harm to himself or his family. The risk is particularly high during the absence from home of an adult male member, and harm comes from an individual who gains unauthorised entry into the house through force or deceit. In major cities the danger on this score has been markedly reduced by the hiring of private security guards and the installation of CCTV and an intercom system for voice identification of each visitor.

The second most urgent objective should be to explore how to make our women safer in public places. I know I am treading here on dangerous grounds, when I dare to say that many – mind you, not all shocking attacks on women have been the result of victims throwing caution to the wind. At the same time, women frowning on advice to observe reasonable precautions is being insensitive to a fast changing environ.

The culprits here are the so-called ‘activists’, who appear on TV mainly to scream at anyone who advocates woman circumspection in accessing public places which are prone to crime. I am sad that all who have the safety of women at heart have been intimidated into silence. I must chronicle here one positive development. A lot of technology has been used to great effect in making travel in hired vehicles by our working women, especially those in the IT sector, much safer than before.

Protecting Children

The world over, child predators are growing in numbers, and they constantly look for targets. This is why close monitoring of computer use by our children becomes vital. Gone are the days when it was easy to do this because children had only desktop computers which were easy to scrutinise. With the arrival of smartphones this has become problematic.

Guardians should devise methods by which use of these phones is curtailed to the extent possible, and restricted only to hours when children need to have telephones for their personal safety during commuting to and from schools. The ease with which three British girls left their homes recently to travel to Syria to join the ISIS, right under the nose of their unsuspecting mothers, does make a mockery of all parental supervision. There is still no case for relaxing vigilance at home.

In sum, there is a lot that we as parents can do to protect ourselves and our wards. To expect the police to guard us during every waking moment is being preposterously unreasonable. I am not either holding a brief for the police or being critical of them. As presently organised, they are both insensitive and too preoccupied with their VIP chores and other law and order concerns for offering protection to us at our homes. You must thank your stars that there is more than a semblance of protection in our public places against conventional crime.

(The writer is a former CBI Director)

(This is the concluding part of a two-part series on recently released NCRB data. First part can be read here.)