An analysis of the sustained protests against the quality of policing responses being witnessed in India’s metropolitan cities including Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai and Pune serves to convey one testy message to the governments. The message is ingrained in the unequivocal national statement that ‘metropolitan policing’ needs imperative recasting and restructuring.
How to get the process of recast accomplished is one of the major challenges that confronts the national security administration. The unprecedented public outburst following the barbaric gang rape of a 23- year-old woman in a moving bus in the Indian capital makes the need for urgent follow-up action to recast priorities in the domain of urban policing.
The central and state governments can no longer escape acknowledging the fact that there should be a clear identification of priorities for mandating safety and security. A time-bound agenda must be worked out and the slew of measures agreed upon must be implemented in a linear and unambiguous process.
The Centre must make available to the states the required funds for restructuring metropolitan policing beyond the contours of the existing subsidies extended routinely for police modernisation. Financial constraints should not be allowed to override imperatives of national security.
The major thrust area of concern in any future recast and restructuring of Metropolitan Policing in India should be women and our children. At the same time, the government must make a conscious effort to de-emphasise and de-prioritise excess components of VIP Policing.
Such a diversion in thrust and governance focus would help in dispelling the feeling that policing is heavily biased towards the security of the rich and powerful and the safety and well -being of the people is not its main priority.
Besides high grade logistics, transport, means of telecommunication, our thrust ought to be on Hub Control Policing, with each Hub monitoring the work schedules for 3/4 police stations to facilitate preventive policing and effective investigations. Metropolitan policing efficiency cannot be any longer premised on modular police stations as found in Delhi, Mumbai and other major cities. The success rate of the NYPD and LAPD respectively in recent years more than doubled after New York and Los Angeles Police Departments elevated to data based Hub policing methodologies.
These methodologies optimise intra-city digital and executive co-ordination among police, transport, border controls, central agencies, disaster management and other safety networks for vulnerable groups to elevate confidence levels among the people. A police station at the end of the street doesn’t necessarily achieve good policing outcome. Those achieving good policing outcome are the police officers out on the road doing the job. The guiding principle of the “hubbing” concept currently changing the shape of metropolitan policing in the western countries is the notion that co-locating more officers at larger stations, centralised in key population and crime-growth areas, puts more police on the street during all hours of the day and provides them with better support.
Greater infusion of modern technology will make the hubbing concept feasible in India, something that would not have been viable 30 years ago. Metropolitan police can now receive their jobs via data transmission to in-car TADIS computers rather than by voice over the radio. The way the public interacts with police has also changed with technology. As access to Internet and mobile telecommunication increases, fewer people need to visit police station shop fronts.
Integration should be accompanied by the development of soft skills among members of the metropolitan force. The underlying significance of dealing with young boys and girls and migrant groups should be driven home to revitalise police image and improve police-people liaison at different levels.
The Union government has set up a Commission of Inquiry to go into the causes of police failure in handling the latest Delhi gang rape and its aftermath. This would be an exercise in futility if the report of the commission meets the fate of the earlier commissions whose reports are lying in the dust bin for want of appropriate legislative and executive action. If the government is really serious about tackling the challenges, the report of the commission can form the basis for a larger action plan to revamp metropolitan police force in India.
While a committee under the former Chief Justice of India is mulling changes in law required to ensure better safety and security for women, children and other disempowered groups and the Parliament and state legislatures are waiting for its report before taking follow-up action, executive actions required for re-orienting metropolitan police force need not wait.
The Delhi gang rape has underlined vital gaps in the patrolling system of our police force and raised many questions. Where were the patrolling parties and the police control vans which are supposed to keep a watch in their defined territories? Why did they not notice anything unusual when the rapists were mauling the young defenseless couple in a moving chartered bus for nearly an hour? Why were preventive mechanisms not put in place to avert such a glaring catastrophe on the city’s main thorough-ways, despite the fact that the Supreme Court and other high powered bodies have issued clear directives? There are few answers to these questions from a self-obsessed Delhi society or the concerned but largely helpless political frame which views Delhi as a ‘state within a state’. There is an unfortunate perception among police delivery cadres, including the senior echelon, that the range of paternalistic control freaks operating from the Lutyen’s Zone are neither easily identifiable nor easy to placate.
No doubt a reform in the police system is long overdue. The Supreme Court has already issued a slew of guidelines, which largely remain unimplemented or indifferently implemented. Delhi can be the starting point for a radical restructuring and reinvigoration of the metropolitan policing module.
The Writer is a former Additional Secretary in the Cabinet Secretariat