The Good Cop Manifesto

Context: How IPS officers can increase credibility, deliver sense of security.

Challenges of a Police:

• To fulfil diverse expectations of the citizens: People expect the police to control crime so that they can breathe easy and sleep well. Interestingly, they want you to be as fearless as a tiger, quick like lightning, selfless like Mother Teresa and submissive like slaves, all at the same time.
• Social media and entertainment: Hypercritical mass media and unbridled message-sharing platforms have added fuel to the fire.
  • Together, they have created an echo chamber where even well-meaning people cry for instant brutal reprisals against acts of violence.
• Limited and complex resource management: With multiple entry levels, a unit has a split organisational personality. Educated and articulate at the top, it gets less so as you reach the other end, leading to a lack of communication.
• Rising cyber-crimes: Economic offences and cybercrimes have gone through the roof in recent years.

Way Forward: What can be done by the police -

• Crime control based on differentiation:
  • 90% of the people don’t want to deal with police: Need to soothe them with strategic police presence, prompt service delivery and effective communication.
  • 7-8% are situationally driven by crime: Most of the time, not knowing that it would only further aggravate and perpetuate their miseries. Better, find a way to reclaim them.
  • 2-3% of people choose to break the law consciously: To them, it’s a high-risk-quick-money venture. Just get after them.
  • Map violent property offenders of 10 years on variables like age, affiliation to gangs, propensity for violence, number of offences committed and dependence on crime proceeds and commit 10-20% of posted strength for them.
• Resist being an encounter specialist: It involves medieval tactics and has been discarded long ago for being ineffective.
  • It will make your unit hostage to elements that may turn out to be even worse than the malcontents they pose to fight.
• Develop leadership: Teach your juniors to be like yourself, not the other way around. Hit the ground running, work through volatility, marshal meagre resources and take control of the situation in no time.
• Devise problem-solving models: Additional budget or manpower is scarce. And thus best chance is one’s ability to devise problem-solving models.
  • For example, host listening sessions with community leaders and vulnerable sections, inviting their opinions on how best to deploy available police resources.
  • Along with crime hotspot analysis, work out a more assuring preventive police deployment plan.
  • Checking grievance redressal:
    • If anyone reaches out to you with complaints of police inaction, tell your station house officer to call them and take any of three actions in a week’s time — register a case if it is about a cognisable offence, re-route if it concerns other departments and file it if it is false.
    • If they fail to do so, tell them to appear before you with the complainant.
  • Communicate with the people: To tackle the allegations of tardy performance, reinvent communication strategies and tell people how hard and successfully one’s unit is working.
• Checking cyber-crimes: Need to commit a good number of your posted strength to catch up with this new breed of criminals, looting people at will from remote and, most often, untraceable locations.
• Increase engagement with the people: Rebrand your beat officers as family police officers, very much like family lawyers and doctors.
  • Tell them to visit the families on their beats with prior appointments and advise them on safety matters. Task them to home-deliver challans, copies of FIRs and verification reports.