THE public is beginning to realise that the police force cannot deliver what it promises.

In Police for the Future, David Bayley asserts that dependence on law enforcement for crime-control exposes the police, as well as the criminal justice system, to being scapegoated. Inflated expectations lead to the loss of trust and credibility. Crime cannot be prevented exclusively through law enforcement; the police force constitutes a band-aid on cancer.

What should societies do to prevent crime? What should the police do? We cannot rely solely upon the police force to save society from crime. No single institution can do that. At the same time, we must charge the police with taking the lead in exploring what must be done. In institutional terms, that is the essence of policing.

Can this be done? I think so. Established in 1861 on the Irish Constabulary model, the police force in Pakistan has been a coercive instrument of the state, structured on a military-style force and lacking community-service qualities. Consequently, it has always been used and misused by governments both civilian and military to perpetuate their misrule and pursue ill-conceived policies that were not reflective of the societal will. Lack of public trust was the natural outcome.

Policing needs to be demilitarised. It must no longer be viewed as a war dominated by the use of force that has been devised by the senior ranks and carried out by ‘troops’ whose primary duty is obedience. It needs to be stood on its head.

In conventional policing, the assessment of needs and the development of strategies is achieved at the top, by senior command; lower echelons carry out the plans that headquarters formulate. In order for crime to be prevented effectively, the responsibility for diagnosing needs and formulating action plans must be given to frontline personnel.

Higher echelons should have a supporting role and should either deliver the necessary resources or manage the organisation in a facilitating manner. The roles of staff and line personnel must be reversed.

Four areas of policing require immediate reforms: restructure the urban police; adopt community policing; initiate problem-oriented policing; and fix the fractured police command.

Since the adoption of the Police Rules of 1934, no serious attention has been given to organisational restructuring. Policing large urban centres is based on the archaic rural- and town-policing formulae based on population and the number of cases, while 80pc of the force is constabulary performing mechanical functions.

Cities such as Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar, Quetta and Islamabad require a metropolitan policing model in which the basic unit of the police has to be raised from the present-day inadequate police station to a self-contained sub-division with a responsible supervisory officer providing the following essential services under one roof: registration of first-information reports or FIRs, investigation, dealing with public complaints, supervising beat patrolling, collecting criminal intelligence and addressing community concerns.

The supervisory officer of the rank of deputy or assistant superintendent of police, well-equipped and resourced, should become the hub of policing a large city which may then be divided into four or five territorial divisions headed by superintendents or senior superintendants of the police who deal with management and resource allocation to basic units.

They should have teams of professional police officers supporting them in intelligence-based investigations and the provision of a dedicated rapid response force for raids and arrests. The divisional police commanders should then report to a senior police chief of the city. The current 80-20 junior rank to supervisory rank ratio should be 60-40.

The next area of reforms deals with community policing. Not a single police department in our country has a community policing or crime-prevention branch at the police headquarters. No strategic thinking is taking place at the command level in terms of the prevention of crime. There is no exploration of cause and effect. Fire-fighting approaches have failed.

Let us rethink the whole philosophy of community policing. The frontline of policing should be comprised of experienced and carefully selected neighbourhood or community police officers (CPOs) who assess all the security needs of areas assigned to them and determine corrective action. The CPO must be known as ‘our police officer’.

CPOs cannot reform society, but they can at least be expected to address local circumstances that lead to crime and disorder. They would be the general practitioners of policing, concentrating on consultations with people who have incipient problems and the care of victims of crime. The creation of frontline CPO officers would institutionalise preventive diagnosis and problem-solving; they must be the best and the brightest of them all.

Given the current state of lawlessness, adopting a problem-oriented approach to policing is crucial. When Rudy Giuliani, then New York mayor, took this approach, it brought down the annual murder rate from 2,000 to 600 in two years in the 1990s.

The idea is to identify a problem, create a task force comprised of police and representatives of relevant departments, and then go all out to address the issue within a time frame. Zero tolerance for even minor deviance leads to the prevention of major crimes. The certainty of punishment is more effective than the selective severity of punishment. Knee-jerk responses to crime situations always flop and reduce the credibility of the state.

A case in point is the Sindh government’s recent, failed de-weaponisation campaign. We did not examine the causes of the failure of two earlier national campaigns in the 1990s and in 2003-4. Criminals do not cough up illegal weapons as a result of media warnings. Such campaigns are part of a sustained policy, not requiring publicity and fanfare but intelligence-based vigilance and the cooperation of the community. Hence, the need for community policing based on public trust.

Finally, the current fractured command of the police has resulted in a politicised, criminalised and brutalised force that has lost the trust of the citizens. The politicians, policymakers and police commanders are equally responsible. The posting of independent, honest, brave and law-abiding police chiefs will stem the rot. Such officers need to be sought in this rudderless state.

The writer is a retired police officer.