ON GUARD: Officials of Tamil Nadu police at a boys club

What is the image of the police in our minds? Corrupt, insensitive, ineffective? J.K. Tripathy, now inspector general, (Armed Police), Tamil Nadu Police, wanted to change that. He put his ideas into action in 1999 when he was posted in Tiruchirapalli (Trichy), a communally sensitive town in Tamil Nadu, as Commissioner of Police and DIG.

“In society, only 5 per cent are deviants, but we tend to alienate the 95 per cent. The idea was to tackle the deviant 5 per cent without alienating the 95 per cent,” says Tripathy. His idea hinged on the ‘beat system’, where constables are assigned beats or neighbourhoods to patrol. Tripathy divided Trichy into 57 zones, each with four beat officers.

He then studied in detail how the British ‘Bobbies’ maintain community relations in an increasingly racially-divided Britain. Other inputs came from the ‘Koban’ system of policing in Japan, where officers are seen as the gentle ‘big brother’. NGOs’ inputs were also sought.

J. K. Tripathy

Tripathy redefined the job description of the beat officers. Apart from regular policing, they now did everything from fixing street lights to helping senior citizens cross the road.

Soon, the beat officers won the community’s trust, and this led to a significant development. Along with the police, the locals now had a stake in maintaining law and order. They shared more information with the police, allowing them to take better pre-emptive action.

A beat house was created to specifically service an area. Also, the police found that cooperating locals were allowing them access into communally-sensitive areas, where they had been earlier denied entry by local leaders.

Once this system was regularised, the police embarked on other schemes. One was suggestion boxes. These were placed across the city; citizens put in their complaints and suggestions there, sometimes anonymously.

Says Tripathy: “No policeman will believe that he draws his authority from the common man. So, the premise is take people into confidence and let them give solutions.” (Later, in charge of Chennai’s Traffic Police, in 2001-02, he would do much the same thing to solve the city’s traffic bottlenecks.) He also revived a concept that existed in Tamil Nadu in the 1950s — boys’ clubs for juvenile delinquents. These clubs would educate children, organise games like beach cricket for them and so on.

Later efforts included setting up self-help groups for women and, along with NGOs, providing distressed women with counselling, a step ahead of the women’s help lines that exist across all police stations in Tamil Nadu.

From 2002 to 2004, seminal work was done with wives of fishermen. Their husbands are usually addicted to illicit liquor and fritter away their earnings. The police, again with NGOs, organised the women into self-help groups. Today, many of them run small businesses and are not completely dependent on their husbands’ earnings. An ex-convict rehabilitation programme was also set up by Tripathy. Many of them are now employed, mainly in security agencies run by ex-policemen.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the experiment has brought down crime in Trichy. The model is now being extended slowly across the state and has been adopted by the Madurai, Coimbatore and the Chennai police.