Legitimate concerns about the safety of women have come to the forefront in recent times. Crimes against women have led to public fury and the enhancement of sentences meted out to the offenders. The police are looking to find enduring solutions. The question that needs to be addressed is whether Community Policing (CP) provides viable solutions that ensure women’s safety.
The safety and security of women is a subset of the overall security architecture. It is specious to argue that in an insecure neighbourhood, beset with chain-snatching, robberies, and other crimes, the security of women can be exclusively ensured. What is feasible, however, is to sanitize an entire area from anti-social activities and thereby, harvest a secure ecosystem.
As a second step, we need to analyse the most optimal methods of sanitizing a neighbourhood. Two approaches present themselves; firstly, the traditional enforcement mechanisms, described as ‘Hard Policing’ by some, which may include preventive detentions, increase in police presence, aggressive patrolling, emphasis on detections and gathering of criminal intelligence. This may not always succeed given the severe resource crunch and legal constraints.
The second approach is focused on unorthodox and counter-intuitive interventions – the ‘Soft Policing’. Such an intervention would inevitably encompass CP in all its avatars. CP acts like a force multiplier, providing the law enforcement machinery, a recourse to nip problems in the bud. The Area Suraksha Mitras (ASMs), who are local and selected from across the spectrum of society, would complement police personnel and work with them. Simultaneously, CP in this format holds a mirror onto the police themselves, reducing abuse of authority and allowing for rapid feedback mechanisms to flourish.
CP provides an easy vestibule for society, especially its most vulnerable sections, to approach law enforcement. This in turn magnifies police presence at practically no extra cost to the exchequer as the ASMs are volunteers. Most offences, particularly those against women, are opportunistic and tend to occur in thinly policed areas. Any mechanism that enhances the presence of law enforcement agencies is an automatic shield against such crimes.
The police stations of Bengaluru where CP was employed in this configuration did see a dramatic surge in public engagement with the police. A good way to orient CP towards ensuring the security of women would perhaps be to engage more women volunteers as ASMs and also integrate existing surveillance instruments like CCTV cameras, mobile phones and social media to further magnify the reach of the enforcers. However, the penetration of CP in Bengaluru stations has been limited so far and it certainly would not hurt to expand its reach.
It needs to be stated with some regret that the adoption of CP has remained stunted owing to the mistaken belief that it is ‘Soft Policing’. Policing needs no adjectives, and qualifying it as ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ runs contrary to the very objective of law enforcement which is to ensure an environment free of crime and anti-social activities.
If any policing precept epitomizes maintenance of law and order in a democracy, it is surely CP. Given the demands of urban citizens that our public and private spaces are made secure for women, it is time we embraced the prescription afforded by CP.
(Series concludes. S.T. Ramesh is former Director-General and Inspector-General of Police, Karnataka, and one of the advisers to Janaagraha’s project on community policing. Pronab Mohanty is an IPS officer of Karnataka who is presently working as Deputy Director-General, UIDAI, Bengaluru.)
