Straight Line
The other dimension of police management
Although a police organisation appears as an archetypal legal-rational bureaucracy in the Weberian mould, in practice policy is formulated and implemented with a characteristic lack of attention to the precepts of rationality. As such, it is not unusual to see that police organisations of different societies, Bangladesh inclusive, find themselves committed to achieving the impossible.
One classic illustration of venturing to reach such an impossible objective is the much-publicised solemn declaration to reduce crime levels, or the utopian scenario of zero crime. This is so because, while zero tolerance of crime may be an admirable strategy, the expectation of zero crime shall continue to remain in the realm of imagination.
Some may take exception to the aforementioned hard comment. However, the reality, sociologically speaking, is that while we must develop for our survival, social dislocation and disorganisation, wanton disregard for the existing values by the deviants are some of the inevitable concomitant price that the country has to pay in the process. The rising crescendo of crime and the ever-surging juvenile delinquency are uncomfortable, destabilising phenomena we have to put up with.
On a practical level, senior enforcement officials have little information about or control over their principal resource -- the subordinate ranks. There is an absence of strategic planning and little attempt to identify and disseminate good practices. Usually, most attention is paid to the avoidance of negative consequences. Therefore, in conditions of managerial drift the operatives react differently for reasons that are often difficult to understand.
The consequences of management- by default- may actually be dangerous. Poor training, for example, in "street survival" skills has been fatal. At times, members of the public have suffered as a result of the abdication of management.
In Bangladesh, where policing is not considered an investment, and is, in fact, principally treated as a non-development expenditure, there is still a need to inject greater managerial discipline into the service. For good governance in tune with the aspirations of a democratic polity, the police have to be subjected to the doctrines of "new public management." As an organization, it needs to be introduced to a performance culture through the application of performance indicators and other managerial devices.
Whatever be the imperatives of modern police management, the often unappreciated fact is that the most important person in the organisation is the officer who deals with the public on the street. The irony is that this person operating at the bottom of the hierarchy suffers the worst pay and conditions.
In the case of police management the above has particular significance, since those at the base of the hierarchy have tremendous power. The curious part of policing is that discretion increases as one descends the rank structure.
To be specific, street-level officers routinely make decisions -- such as to arrest -- that are not only fateful for the citizen but also for the organisation. Arrests made on insufficient or fabricated evidence can plunge an entire police service into scandal and public disrepute.
The uncomfortable experience of policing in most places, specially in third world situations like ours, is that authority is exercised predominantly over the marginal and excluded sections of the population who tend to be powerless. Therefore, if the exercise of that authority is incompetent or illegal, the consequences for the organisation are unlikely to be serious.
We have to appreciate that the transformation of confrontational, and often confusing, reality of streets into the demanding world of evidence is a daunting task. This is so because such evidence will be publicly examined in a court. It is only natural that the effort for garnering the evidence are fraught with danger for the police organization, if it is done incompetently. One should also take note that senior police officers do not often deal with the marginalised and dispossessed but with those who have power, such as politicians and the mass media.
There are quarters that argue that the strictly bureaucratic model, that is, the hierarchical structure of command and control, is ill-suited to a discretionary activity like policing, that is largely conducted in isolation and beyond the sight of the organisation. Some say that policing is a craft that involves substantial "dirty work."
Everyday experience indicates that the police patrol the boundaries of respectability, keep the disreputable in their place, which becomes visible only when things go wrong, and rarely lends dignity to any of those involved. Therefore, when policing moves on a path so dangerously close to illegality and oppression, the necessity of strong central control has progressively increased after each major law and order incident.
The self-imposition of a code of ethics as an effective tool to prevent police wrongdoing has never been examined in our situation. The important question is whether high levels of individual accountability can be achieved in a police structure which combines command and hierarchical discipline. Equally important is the public belief in the individual accountability of police officers.
In the west, particularly in the police structures of England, the concept of quasi- commercial management, as distinct from commonly known military structures, has been attempted. This approach seeks to make policing policy-driven. However, the question remains if this approach, adopted from business management, can be validly applied to the police organisation.
Policing is, of necessity, reactive and "crisis management;" that is, managing other people's crises. This has profound consequences for police management, for the activity that must be managed is indefinite. A crisis can occur at any time and must be reacted to there and then; not when it is organisationally convenient. Moreover, crises can take any form. The fact that unforeseen situations become a crisis makes it difficult to plan for them, beyond making available a generic response capability -- the police. However, the lesson for us is that the pursuit of rational police management through policing by objectives should be embarked upon, taking into view the practical limitations.
Muhammad Nurul Huda is a columnist of
The Daily Star.
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