I have been heading the Maharashtra Railway Police for nearly a year now. It has been quite a large playfield – about 5000 workforce – for small experimentations in policing. The Railway police could do with a better reputation on their professionalism and commuter assistance. Some small interventions are however yielding positive signs of change.
Getting SPs and other senior officers to closely monitor serious crime investigations through a system of Progress Reports. A major deficit in railway police performance was the poor quality of investigations that happened and the poor rate of detection and apprehending of criminals in robbery/theft cases. Railway crimes are as mobile as the trains on which they occur and if swift action is not initiated immediately after the crime has taken place, the evidence which could be got from co-passengers/train staff and train vendors is lost. The supervision by senior officers, over the investigations being done at the police stations was, however, sorely lacking. I decided to take railway crime work back to the basics. All serious crimes of robbery, murders, crimes against women and children were brought under a system of special report cases to be monitored by all supervisory officers from the DySP upto me. Under this system- it took a lot of effort to get the system rolling- every month I receive from the SPs and CP, who are Unit heads, the progress reports on compliance of initial instructions on all these cases till such time as they complete investigations. An interesting observation was the clearly visible improving detection rate and apprehending of criminals and the recovery of stolen property. I think this improving quality of professional work will show on the morale of the railway police and their self image as this professional capability gets further consolidated.
Encouraging display of humaneness by the policemen deployed on railway stations. Railway stations and trains are used by a large part of the indian population especially the poorer and middle classes. Mumbai alone has around 8 million daily commuter traffic. But the Railway police have always been suspect in their eyes. We started a program called ‘Beyond the Call of Duty’ wherein acts of humaneness and rendering of help by the railway police to railway users was especially acknowledged by us as police leaders, and handsomely rewarded from government funds, at specially held police conferences. It was not only personally rewarding for me to see the acts of compassion as well as bravery of our policemen and women, but I could see that it was extremely motivating for the junior policemen and women to do more such compassionate acts since now that was being appreciated by their police leaders. I feel it may not after all be too difficult a task to change police organisational culture!! Just create the right role models for others to emulate.
WhatsApp as a medium for creating a vision/direction for railway policing and for peer review of performance of police chiefs. I think this is a great communication medium to get consensus for and then to focus work of police chiefs, towards the desired goals. For Railway policing, we focussed on the above two performances. And each Unit’s individual successes were celebrated and appreciated in this peer group. All it needed was an unwavering guiding hand to stay the course, which I think I could provide.
In India, we have extraordinary capability at the middle management police leadership level-but it is only a potential capability unless it is put to the task of change and reforms.
Pradnya Saravade's Blog 