BackTweet if you see a criminal
Under M.N. Reddi, Bengaluru's police force is plugged in to the future of community policing, says Priya Ramani
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When daughter Roshni, an employee with Google in Singapore, told her father that working in tech-hub Bengaluru he should probably be on Twitter, he enlisted the help of the lone soul who monitored the Facebook page at work and set up an account. Who knew it would be the start of an exciting social networking experiment that has the potential to change the nature of urban policing in India.
It’s been nine months since M.N. Reddi, Bengaluru’s commissioner of police (CP), joined Twitter @CPBlr along with his key deputies and it’s already looking like the department’s plugged in to the future of community policing. Reddi is comfortable on this medium. He usually browses his account when he’s commuting, whizzing through his timeline, retweeting, favouriting, forwarding parking and traffic complaints to the department’s traffic handle (50% of Bengalureans’ complaints are about traffic) and alerting the right officers. A passport handle was set up to handle the flood of queries in India’s fastest growing city.
His timeline overflows with information about misdemeanours such as the nail mafia (a gang places nails on the road to puncture your tyres and the conveniently located tyre shop overcharges you to fix them), fake currency dens, late night loud music, theft, illegal gas cylinder refilling sheds and gambling clubs. Old world style excel sheets are used to track if complaints have been resolved.
Unlike most police chiefs across the world who use their handles only to disperse departmental information and press releases, Bengaluru’s CP uses Twitter to interact with people. Predictably, the biggest users are the city’s techies.
He also uses it to dispel rumours. So last December when Bengalureans heard there had been a bomb blast at a church, the CP—and his deputy who was at the scene shortly after and tweeting from there—clarified that it was a low-intensity blast, on Church Street and not at any place of worship.
Imagine that—free access to the top cop in your city. No other city in India can say the same although top policemen in other parts of the state and regions such as Hyderabad, Belagavi (formerly Belgaum), Hubli-Dharwad and Mysuru have been inspired by Bengaluru’s experience and joined Twitter recently. I couldn’t find Mumbai’s finest on Twitter and Delhi is represented by its traffic policemen. “People think the police commissioner is a rarefied commodity. They think to get in touch with him must be impossible. I think we’ve broken that myth once and for all. I’m accessible and my successor will have to be accessible to the public," says Reddi, when we meet at his office.
It’s newsworthy because quick access to top brass usually comes with political clout or a family/friend connection.
Everyone has a police horror story. I just heard about two women being abducted in north India by a gang of gun-wielding men. When the person with them rushed to the station to lodge a complaint, he was told: “Don’t worry, they will show up by tomorrow. It’s happened before." It was like the plot of that recent film NH10, except that unlike lead actor Anushka Sharma, these women didn’t win in the end.
Until I met my father-in-law, an incorruptible, dynamic, rule-abiding, retired-but-always-remembered police officer, my composite of the profession was drawn largely from the vengeful, corrupt caricatures of Hindi films. If they were not evil, the intensity of their goodness drained you by interval. Before I wrote this piece, I had never met a serving policeman who is on Twitter—and who replies in real time.
“Twitter builds a community around a handle. Everybody knows what everybody’s saying," Reddi tells me. From one wall of his office, 28 of his predecessors look down on our conversation about policing in the digital age, a phenomenon most of them never encountered in their professional lives.
“Everybody knows the police commissioner has taken note of it or forwarded it. The police officer who gets the directive also knows that everybody knows. Down the line too, officers feel the weight of expectations that so many people know that I am yet to do this work. I think it is a very healthy pressure," he says.
Sample this early morning exchange:
Could you please help us find our father? We’ve lodged a complaint at Girinagar station…
Maybe the CP is busy because one of his deputy officers B.S. Lokesh Kumar replies.
We will make all sincere efforts
Twenty-five minutes later, Reddi also replies to the tweet about the missing father, tagging M.G. Nagendra Kumar, DCP Command Centre, who is also in charge of the social media division.
All police stations should be activated immediately. Let me have a report by 12 noon today.
When we meet, just after 1pm, the report hasn’t come in yet, but Reddi is tracking its progress. The police are in touch with the complainant through the day.
The department’s social networking team has grown from just H.M. Lokesh to 20 people in a roomful of computers and a big television screen. A social media lab tracks and analyses trending discussions. Lokesh is that same first employee of the social media division who helped get the department on Twitter. He joined the police force as a constable after working eight years in the private sector in call centres and BPOs—he wanted the security of a government job. Along the way he acquired a master’s degree in political science through correspondence and taught himself about the Internet, but his responsibilities centred mainly round patrolling and sentry duty. Until he was transferred one day in 2013 to help build the department’s presence on Facebook.
Three of the 16 accounts that form Twitter Samvad, a recently launched partnership with Twitter that gives subscribers curated tweets via SMS, belong to the Bengaluru police. Any day now, you’ll be able to contact the police on WhatsApp. They’re just gathering the courage and the resources to launch that service because they know everybody and his auntie uses WhatsApp. Cyberabad’s police department was overloaded when its WhatsApp number was made public earlier this year.
Of course, when things go wrong, as they sometimes do, Twitter is not the place you want to be. Policing in the digital age is not easy, agrees Reddi. “Plus, you’re always under scrutiny."
Priya Ramani will share what’s making her feel angsty/agreeable every fortnight.
Also Read Priya’s previous Lounge columns
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