Police should be more proactive

The frequency of petty as well as serious crimes has registered a sharp rise recently. Increase in the number of petty crimes like stealing, mugging, snatching, etc., means that the police patrol at the crime-prone spots in the city or elsewhere in the country is either lax or absent.  But when it comes to rising incidence of violent and organised crimes like robbery, murder, death threats, kidnapping and killing for ransom, it is a matter of serious concern. Most of the time, police response to these violent crimes is rather slow and sometimes quite absent. In response to inquiries from journalists, the answers are usually passive. The matter would be looked into after a case against the reported crime is lodged, the on-duty police officer would usually answer. But such kind of attitude of the law-enforcement agencies towards public security about six months after the current interim government has been in office is unacceptable. One may recall at this point that the Inspector General of Police, Moinul Islam,   more than four and a half months ago, on September 10 last year instructed the police to adopt zero tolerance against criminal activities and militancy. But so far no sign of improvement is visible on the law and order front. Worse yet, things have now come to such a pass that at some places of the city, pedestrians are not safe even during daytime, let alone in the evening. Consider the recent case of students on Saturday (January 25) blocking the Dhaka-Mymensingh highway near the Tongi Station Road for 45 minutes between 11:30 am and 12:15 pm. They were protesting frequent incidents of mugging in which many of the victims were students. Demanding safety, students from different educational institutions of the area participated in the road blockade. It could be further learnt from the protesting students that every day on an average some 60 to 70 mugging incidents take place in the Gazipur Stationn Road area and some 20 students have, reportedly, already fallen victim to mugging.

 This is the situation in only one spot of this sprawling metropolis of about 20 million residents.  There are also places in the city which people consider dangerous.  What are the police stations of those areas doing when people on the street are being attacked by thieves under their watch? This is about the safety of general public. Now, how are the business people faring?  Alarming reports that members of some underworld criminal and terror gangs, who had since 2001 been in prison, have been released on bail following the political changeover in August last year. Among them are 43 well known top terrors. Some of them have been freed from prison while others have come out of hiding.  The members of the business community are concerned as they have regularly been getting phone calls from those terrorists and their agents demanding large sums of extortion money. In this connection, some incidents of kidnapping and murder have already been reported in the media.  It would be worthwhile to mention here the hacking of two computer traders in broad daylight in the Elephant Road area early this month. Around 20 assailants, some of them wearing masks, reportedly took part in the attack. Most importantly, the victims were not ordinary traders. As the reports go, they were respectively the president and secretary of the local traders' associations. Before the attack, the victims were learnt to have received phone call from an operative of one of the aforementioned underworld terror gangs demanding a large sum of toll money. As they refused to comply, the gang members made good on their threat. 

Clearly, by attacking leaders of the trading community of the Elephant Road area in question, the terrorists were demonstrating their strength as well as sending signal to others that similar fate is awaiting them lest they are found disobliging to their demands.  It appears, the criminal gangs in question have something to do with the political changeover. As the criminals who ran the show during the past regime have fled the scene, the vacuum thus created in the criminal underworld is being filled up by their rivals. Evidently, those underworld gangs are wielding their power. To all appearances, it is business as usual for the criminal underworld. Some gangs enjoy political patronage under a particular government while their rivals get similar protection under another political government. But following the August revolution, the public's expectation was that the age-old sick culture of different political parties providing shelter to different antisocial elements to meet their respective agenda would go. In its place a new culture of clean politics would emerge where hired goons and terrorists will have no place. 

But the signs look ominous. It is believed the post-revolution police force would be different from their predecessors under previous governments. In those times, the police's job was to mainly do the bidding of their political bosses in the government rather than serving the people. An offshoot of that culture, on the part of the police, was to look the other way when serious crimes like murder was committed by the underworld gangs enjoying patronage of certain political leaders in power. This evil culture saw its extreme form during the previous autocratic regime. But should we allow those bad old days to return after so much blood of students and ordinary people spilled during the uprising? The police, too, had to pay a heavy price during the uprising as they turned purely into minions of the political thugs of the previous regime and, thus, went against the people they are supposed to serve. Now since the interim government is trying to restore an impartial, rule-based system in every branch of governance, the police are definitely not any exception to that. In the present circumstances, as they are not beholden to any political master, they should be able to exercise full independence in performing their duty. This question arises because it has recently been observed that the police's response to crime, including even the serious ones, is often found lethargic. They are as though waiting for a political master to lord it over them as in the past. No doubt, they are supposed to function under political governments. But that does not mean that they have to serve as a lackey of any political leader. The police need to understand their new role as servants of the state and demonstrate it by swinging into full action in combating crime.

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