In the United States, the chief of police is an elected official. He reports to the mayor of the town he serves. This is in sharp contrast to what happens in our part of the world. In Bihar, the police chief responsible for Sitamarhi is not elected, but appointed. He reports to the home minister sitting in Patna, not the mayor of Sitamarhi. In Janakpur, it’s similar— the chief of police is appointed by the home minister and reports to the ministry in Kathmandu.
The question for those laying the foundation for Nepal’s future is: Should we adopt the American style or continue with the Bihari style of policing?
Unfortunately, it’s a question Nepali policymakers have not shown any interest in discussing. But surely, it’s one that we should pay attention to—even Britain is. [break]
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Parting with the tradition of Bihari style policing, the British government is experimenting with the American style in England and the Wales. By doing so, the British government hopes to introduce a police force that not only understands the needs of the local communities, but is also more accountable. In this new approach, the chief police officer will be elected and will seek re-election. His pay will also be decided by the public. If he does a good job in reducing crimes, he will be paid more. If he satisfies the population he is expected to serve, he will be re-elected, if not, he will be fired. Whether this new system will help reduce crimes and satisfy the people it is intended to serve will be clear only after a few years. The first election of the chief police officer only happened in 2012; we will have to wait and see whether the transition is successful.
Regardless, the American style of policing is one that we could experiment with—at least in some districts. That will give us a more precise answer to whether it will work for us.
The problem we have right now is that our police forces are bureaucratically accountable, not directly accountable to the public. We are unable to fire them, or punish them. True, we elect politicians, and these bureaucrats are answerable to these politicians, but since even the politicians can’t fire them, they can easily disobey politicians, or create obstacles in implementing policies politicians come up with. Often the bureaucrats deciding the security of a region have little idea of the needs of people living in the area. Because the community is not directly involved, people don’t feel they own the police force, and generally treat it as a foreign force from Kathmandu trying to protect the interest of the center, rather than that of their town or village.
Of course, there might be other problems if we start electing chief police officers. For example, the policing might get politicized and create more tension. If a police chief aligned with UML wins, he might be hard on NC cadres, and soft on UML party workers. And next time around, when the police chief aligned to NC wins, he might want to extract revenge. Alternatively, it could be that while such dynamics occur for the first few times, they soon learn that it is an optimal strategy not to be soft on one party and tough on the other, but focus on being fair and reducing crimes. The latter is what Robert Putnam and Francis Fukuyama, two high profile political scientists, think will happen. Their work shows that only when people come together to solve problems numerous times do they learn to work together. What is more, over time, such working together helps in the development of social norms that parents pass on to their children. This means that direct election of the chief police officer in a village will not only bring people together to work on a common goal to make their neighborhood safe, but also help in developing norms that are conducive to cooperation. This ability to work together might have many other positive benefits in the community.
With federalism, we are likely to have a state-level police force. But the American model suggests going even more local. It suggests that we have a police chief for every district, perhaps every village development committee (VDC). In the US, the lowest units of governance are the counties, and each county has an elected police chief.
A good experiment would be to choose a few districts each from the Himalayan region, Pahadi region, and the Tarai region to experiment with this new idea. Of course we will not know the results of this experiment for a decade, but in matters of nation building it is wiser to think long-term. If it works, we can expand it to more districts. But when conducting this experiment we need to keep in mind that there will be opposition to it from the current police establishment, just like it happened in Britain.
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