KOCHI : “Good morning, how was your experience visiting our police station? Please rate from 0-10.” Don’t be surprised if you get such a call seeking your feedback shortly after your visit to a police station.
The Ernakulam Rural Police, in a first-of-its-kind initiative in the state, has set up a special desk on the lines of customer care desks to collect feedback from the public visiting any of the 34 stations under it for various needs. The initiative follows a direction of state police chief Sheikh Darvesh Sahib on the effective functioning of public relations officers (PROs) in each police station in providing services to people.
Explaining the initiative, Ernakulam Rural police chief Vaibhav Saxena said: “Usually, after visiting a hotel, shop or service centre, we get a call from a customer care representative seeking feedback. The same concept has been applied here. After all, police are also service providers who function on taxpayers’ support.” He said eight officers have been appointed at the desk to contact petitioners turning up at the 34 police stations under the Ernakulam Rural police limit. At present, each officer at the desk is making over 500 calls daily.
So, how does it work? People approach police stations for various purposes, like lodging complaints, filing requests for police and passport verifications, among others. These petitions are uploaded to the Kerala Police’s iCops software by the stations concerned. From there, the officers in the newly-formed desk retrieve the contact number of the petitioners and contact them.
Follow-up will be done if rating is low: Rural SP
“After contacting the petitioner, we enquire whether they received a receipt for their petition. Then we request them to rate the behaviour of police officers as good, average or bad categories. The third question is whether the desired action was taken on the petition. Finally, we ask them to rate their overall experience at the police station on a scale of 0-10,” The Ernakulam Rural SP said, adding a report on the responses is submitted to him daily.
In case the rating is low and petitioner’s experience not good, a team from the Ernakulam Rural police headquarters contacts the station concerned and conducts a follow-up. If a person says the behaviour of police officials was inappropriate, the district police chief can access the station’s CCTV visuals, with the specific date and time, from his laptop.
As for petitioners, they can contact the HQ number from which they had received the call to get updates on their petition and express grievances.
SP Vaibhav said they receive hundreds of petitions at each police station. “Visiting each station daily to verify their response to petitions and functioning is not possible. Through this system, we can assess how effectively a police station is functioning and its people-friendly aspects. It also makes people more confident about approaching the police,” the SP said.
Since the desk is reporting to the district police chief directly, attempts by any police station to influence them will not work.
An officer who is part of the initiative said people have lauded the move. “They sound confident after getting the feeling that the district police chief’s office is monitoring their petitions,” said the officer. On a hilarious note, some people unaware of the initiative contacted the respective police stations to check whether they were contacted by a fraudster!