After five years, Praveen Sood has returned to the city and has taken over as the city Police Commissioner. In his last posting in Bengaluru, he was the Additional Director-General of Police (Administration). Since then, the city has expanded, but the police chief is confident of tackling the challenges ahead — one step at a time. In an interview with The Hindu, he talks about the need to improve the morale of the force, harnessing technology to optimise existing resources and improving intelligence gathering in the age of social media.
What will be your approach to ensure a better Bengaluru?
I am a strong supporter of the Broken Window theory, which is, if you attend to the smaller problems, the bigger ones will be controlled. For example, by enforcing stop lines at traffic signals, one can prevent gridlocks and solve congestion to a great extent. If you tackle the smaller problems, you will get big results.
In the wake of rise in crimes, is there a need to increase visible policing?
We are improving our visible policing. Yes, we have miles to go, but we have to tread slowly. We are one crore people, and this will only increase in the coming years. We cannot keep increasing manpower indefinitely. We have to leverage technology and we have done it. I can say this with confidence. I am coming after five years, and I see that a lot has changed. Earlier, technology was used to control traffic, but now it is there in law and order, crime and even for passport verification. But we have to grow slowly so that the system does not collapse. Earlier, we had 100 Hoysala vehicles, now we have 200 and this will be increased to 300 soon. For a city like Bengaluru, even a thousand Hoysalas won’t be enough, but we cannot increase this immediately.
In the wake of law and order problems seen in 2016, will you focus on improving the city intelligence network?
Yes, city intelligence needs to be improved. And there are challenges too. With advent of social media, the reaction time between an incident in one part of the world and its manifestation in another part has reduced. In such cases, traditional methods of intelligence collapse as information spreads like wild fire.
What will be your priority?
Serving citizens and helping law-abiding people can happen only when the morale of my men is high. My challenge will be to raise the morale of my force mainly of the constabulary. There was a crisis some months ago. Policemen felt that they were not getting what they should. The government gave them a raise, ration money was provided ... government issued recruitment orders for next three years and massive scale recruitment and training is going on. They have been provided with quarters. We have to ensure that these are implemented and the benefits reach them. Their work and living conditions should also be improved. On the day of joining, I inspected a few police housing colonies and ordered the demolition of dilapidated ones. A policeman should take pride in his uniform and job.
Will traffic management be one of your biggest challenges?
Traffic is a huge issue. We have to work on an “as is where is” basis. Traffic is like economics. We have to increase resources like wide roads and public transport and reduce use of private transport. My job is to optimise the use of existing resources.
