Reporting an incident or filing a complaint with the police can be a hassle. In an effort to boost citizen-centric policing, south division police have come up with a novel idea of printing 10,000 stickers bearing details of the neighbourhood beat police.
The stickers, to be glued at nooks and corners of the jurisdiction, are aimed at helping residents know about the beat police operating on their street and communicate with him in case of an emergency.
“This also helps the policemen concerned to become an integral part of the community and have a sense of commitment to his beat,” Rohini Katoch Sepat (DCP, South) told
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Details of women beat police personnel have not been put up though, to avoid the eventuality of harassment, which has been witnessed before, she said.
The move is also expected to help the police. According to a senior police officer, any given police station, on an average, gets hundreds of complaints which are not so serious in nature. “Resolving each and every complaint is tedious and time consuming. However, if the residents call the beat policeman in charge, he could resolve the issue on the spot with little effort, the officer said.
“This will also help the policemen bond with residents of his beat. This exercise would also help policemen strengthen the local intelligence network, which could yield grass-roots-level information for proactive and effective policing,” Ms. Sepat added.
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Before this initiative, WhatsApp groups had been set up by the beat police across the city to share information in the area. As the number of WhatsApp group members are limited, stickers will have an added advantage, especially for residents who are not part of WhatsApp groups, a policeman said. Not only that, knowing the beat policeman will instil a sense of security, as residents will know that a policemen is just a call away.
Citizens welcomed the initiative. “It is more time-consuming to call the control room and wait to be connected to the correct station or policeman. This will help us call the right person at the right time,” said Ravi Rao, a resident of K.R. Road.