Monday, October 28, 2013

Greater policing and social safety



A bigger police force will be able to keep a given society safer.
·         Do you agree or disagree with this?

It takes much more than policing let it be bigger policing, to keep a society safer. Therefore, I find it really hard to endorse the view in question. Here I am going to record what makes me think so.  

By definition, a safer society is one in which people of all walks of life happen to experience a holistic feeling that they are safe in more ways than what is called ‘being free from crimes”. The police force as such is one of the parts of a safer society where there are countless other factors that go into the making of what we called “safer”. For example, a society may go unsafe when there is gender inequality, poor socio-economic status, corruption, unemployment, violence against the weak and this list may go on depending on the size and status of the society in question.  

In such a context, there are innumerable things a bigger police force cannot imagine of doing. Is it possible to assume that a stronger police will be able to pin down crimes on domestic violence unless they are reported? Will it be possible for a police force to mend the ways of children from disturbed families who constitute a sizeable number of crimes in any society? The answer is an emphatic ‘no’. Because, being safer is something more internalized and experienced than executed or implemented. What a police force can do is the latter, not the former.

My conclusion is that a bigger police force may be able to contribute a little to keep the crime records of a society under certain controls, but to keep a society ‘safer’ in the real sense of the term involves much greater things than just policing, of greater policing for that matter.  

290 words
Ajaypeesdoc. 28.10.13
www.jpsukham.blogspot.com

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