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Police and crime prevention

Vehicles are forever on the rise on the country's highways and so are vehicle thefts. Our front page story yesterday on vehicle thefts and its thriving nature would have proved an eye-opener to many. Not only are vehicles being stolen by crime syndicates in increasing numbers, they are reportedly even being hawked in some LTTE - controlled areas of the North - East - so far - flung are the operations of these crime gangs specializing in vehicle thefts.

While the news that a local engineer is proposing to introduce a device which could prevent thefts of this kind is most welcome it should be remembered that the deviousness of crime gangs usually knows no bounds. While such inventions would prove effective in the short and medium term, in particular, serious thought should be given to strategies in crime busting, which would also yield results in the long-term.

IGP T.E. Anandarajah has reportedly announced plans to set up a Crime Command and a Crime Prevention Unit, headed by a DIG, to deal with the problem of crime more effectively. There is no denying the importance of crime prevention as an important, fundamental approach to crime containment. Certainly, this approach to crime would prove more cost-effective and even more humane than the current attitude of essentially tackling crime as and when it occurs.

There is a wide range of crimes which could be nipped in the bud and prevented from going up to courts, where they would be subjected to tardy, time consuming judicial procedures, if the crime prevention approach is adopted. This is, for instance, the case with thefts which today have their roots very often in drug addiction and abuse. If there is, of course, less unemployment and if growing disaffection among our youth is contained, the petty crime rate is bound to decline. Petty crime, it must be remembered, often develops into major crime, as when thefts end up in murders.

The success of the preventive approach to crime containment, therefore, needs to be premised on closer collaboration between the police and the public. The police would be in a position to spot and prevent crime only if it interacts closely with society and is familiar with conditions prevailing in it. As the IGP himself has suggested, the task of policing would be rendered more effective if the police conduct a close dialogue with and work in collaboration with the "village and the temple", for instance.

Besides the police doing its utmost along with other social institutions and actors to rehabilitate the more volatile sections of society, such as the disaffected sections of the youthful populace, the police would also be in a position to detect potential conflicts within the community and to defuse them, by working in close cooperation with the public and its representatives.

Unfortunately, over the past two decades, the police and other law enforcement agencies have displayed a tendency to distance themselves from the public. This is perhaps attributable to the fact that the police too were saddled with the task of containing terrorism. However, it should be a task for the future, now that conflict resolution is very much in the air, to explore ways of bringing the police closer to the people.

In fact, as a senior police officer disclosed yesterday, patrolling is the essence of policing. Patrolling or constant surveying of public space would enable the police to grow once again into a truly people-oriented institution. Ideally, such patrolling needs to take place on foot with the policeman proving more a friendly guardian of the people rather than an impersonal, controlling agency of the State.

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