Police must plan for a long haul of Covid duty

Proper and effective intelligence gathering in these troubled times can spare governments the blushes. Scarcity of food and medicines, rumours, incitement of sections of people for vested interests, dissatisfaction over local issues, poor maintenance of shelters, hoarding and overcharging, can all be brought to the notice of the departments concerned to initiate remedial measures.

Key role: The police have helped people by providing essentials during lockdown.

Somesh Goyal

Somesh Goyal
DGP (Prisons), Himachal Pradesh

Pictures and videos of policemen dishing out corporal punishment to citizens breaking the law and violating the lockdown and curfew have made headlines and gone viral on social media. A number of commentators have put the police in the dock for their unprofessional conduct while dealing with people, groups and crowds stressed variously by the Covid-19 pandemic. There is no question that inflicting corporal punishment on the citizens makes for an ungainly scene and also exposes the inadequacy of police training and understanding of the job and roles by the policemen.

The police, like the medical fraternity, plunged headlong into the task of enforcement of the nationwide lockdown at the call of the state and Central governments, without much strategic and logistics preparation. Unmindful of the risk of the transmission of the virus, police engaged with uncontrollable and emotionally surcharged crowds bent upon violating the lockdown to go to the comfort of their homes and hearths. Who knows how many in the crowds carried the virus from their workplaces? They hardly had any personal protection gear. The much-maligned lathi was there to deal with the disorderly mobs. Masks came in later as the only protection against the deadly virus.

Some sections of society have shown complete disdain for the law and have indulged in irresponsible criminal acts of targeting the medical and paramedical staff and the police even when they had gone to help the communities. Such sordid stories have come from a number of places other than Indore. Obscurantist crowds possessed by the medieval instinct of lynching and stoning have escaped a harsher comment than the men in khaki who are spared no invectives. It is perhaps because the disorderly conduct of the police in a democracy like ours is completely unacceptable.

Irrespective of the brickbats, policemen continue to soldier on to ensure strict compliance of the lockdown to keep the citizenry safe from the transmission of the virus at the community level. They have to play a key role along with the medical fraternity to contain the deadly virus.

In the New York Police Department (NYPD), over 1,400 cops have tested positive and a few have died. Thousands have been quarantined and reported sick. Similarly, hundreds of policemen have been quarantined in countries like Belgium and Singapore following the Covid outbreak. Some doctors and their families have tested positive in India. The frontline policemen also run the same risk. In fact, this occupational hazard in the current scenario extends to their families too. There is an urgent need to provide protective gear to all policemen and sanitise the premises from where they work or reside. Uninterrupted police service is dependent on keeping the frontline staff safe from the virus transmission.

In the face of escalation of the transmission of the disease, demands on police will increase exponentially. The police should start augmenting emergency response helplines to cater to an increased traffic seeking all kinds of help. Adequate staff will have to be apportioned to record and respond to the distress calls from the citizens.

As the slowdown of the economy pushes the number of unemployed and panic about livelihood starts to hit the poor, migrant labourers, illegal immigrants and such other marginalised groups, the police must brace for a spate in crime in the days to come. Smuggling of scarce items, spurious protective equipment and medicines, profiteering and forming of mafias in such times is not uncommon. The law enforcement agencies have to protect the public health facilities, pharmacies, ration depots and trains and trucks bringing essential commodities and relief material.

Proper and effective intelligence-gathering in these troubled times can spare governments the blushes. Scarcity of food and medicines, rumours, incitement of sections of people for vested interests, dissatisfaction over some local issues, poor maintenance of shelters, hoarding, overcharging, etc can all be brought to the notice of the departments concerned to initiate remedial measures.

Normal policing needs to become contactless for the safety of all stakeholders. Contact tracing will become more and more difficult and time consuming in such a situation. Online and telephone frauds and fake news need to be investigated and effectively countered. The police have multifarious roles to perform. It would be prudent to enlist the support of volunteers from Civil Defence, NCC and NSS to perform sundry regulatory tasks. Community outreach by involving opinion leaders, community elders and representatives of the local bodies will improve communication and rumour-mongering will be arrested. Communication with the citizens through official social media platforms will be the key to the success of police bandobast.

The coronavirus is not disappearing in a hurry. It is a long haul. The police must be well prepared against possible burnout. They need to plan working in shifts right now. An angry response from a tired and exhausted policeman due to continuous deployment without adequate rest can tarnish the image of the police.

Do the police really lack the milk of human kindness? There are a number of stories where the police have helped the citizens by providing food, medicines and lift in case of medical and other emergencies. From Haryana, Punjab, Odisha and Madhya Pradesh to Telangana, Karnataka and Kerala, the police have gone beyond the call of their duty to provide succour to the distressed citizens. Community kitchens are running from police stations, police lines and the homes of some police officers. In Haryana alone, the police are providing five lakh food packets to the needy and migrant labourers. Support for what the police are doing in the Covid days is pouring in on social media.

Learning from the mistakes of their colleagues, the police need to gear up to deal with this once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe with professionalism, resolve and, above all, a human touch.