What is the issue?
- The quality of service that people get at grass roots from the police is disatisfying.
- There is a need to transform the police from a traditional outfit into a modern force to upgrade delivery of its service.
What are the issues with Indian police force?
- Political interference.
- Lack of professionalism.
- Lack of audit by dedicated committee.
- Lack of infrastructure investment
- Lack of community support.
- No counter cyber-attack skills
How to professionalise the police department?
- Brainstorming problems of maintaining public order and combating conventional crime.
- Making plans to acquire a fresh mind-set to cope with the needs of a society under attack.
- Improvising the manpower and use of new technology.
- Implementation of scientific approaches like evidence based policing in every day policing activities.
What is evidence based policing (EBP)?
- Evidence-based policing was a movement launched in the U.S and the U.K.,
- It emphasizes the value of statistical analysis and empirical research.
- When left alone to practice individually, officers often act upon their own perception of the facts, which often turn out to be wrong.
- EBP rectifies this by stressing to work based on statistics, changing practices and measuring the success of those changes with risk-adjusted outcomes.
- e.g One strategy is identifying ‘hot spots’ of crime and spotting problematic individuals in a community.
- The Prediction task requires an analysis of events which are either crimes by themselves or border on crimes defined by law.
- There are certain geographic areas in each police jurisdiction which report more incidents than others.
- EBP goes beyond statistics and pinpoints the time and opportunities presented to a potential offender.
- Monitoring behavioural patterns of a class of individuals who had come to the adverse notice of law enforcement is a logical way to predict whether they will again lapse into crime.
Source: The Hindu
