The Bhutanese Leading the way.
The Royal Bhutan Police came up with a day long consultative program on Intelligence Led Policing (ILP) in Thimphu with the main objective to make Bhutan a safer place to live and work.
They will study how the initiative will work in Thimphu for a year and after that other divisions will be asked to upgrade their data and officers will be trained.
The stakeholder consultation meeting was conducted with the theme—making Thimphu a safer place to live and work by changing the way through ILP.
Brigadier Chimi Dorji, Chief of Police said that while coming up with new initiative they have numerous challenges. He said, “Our police force needs to be trained in the field of intelligence collection of data. We need to upgrade our technology without which we cannot compile our data”.
Since this being a new system, he said that it will take some time to register in the mind of the police people and some of the police personnel could be find it confusing as the initiative has lots of components. “Of course they can overcome but we need to upgrade their knowledge and we have to build their capacity,” he added.
On the other hand, he said that they will have lots of expectations from relevant stakeholders and communities which is why they have conducted a stakeholder consultation meeting.
“We expect lots of feedback and meaningful suggestion so that we can collectively have an idea on how to cut down the crime.
We can implement it in our strategic way of policing. Crime is not a police problem, it is problem of the society which is why all of us have to work together to make the city safe”, he added.
Meanwhile, various recommendations were made by the stakeholders. They recommended if RBP could train security personnel, on tourism policing, create more awareness, provide support to those children who is in conflict with the law, work closely with the relevant stakeholders, strengthen the existing hotline number and make it more user friendly, develop crime prevention strategy and create a proper security standard.
Thimphu Thromde added that they are working towards reallocating the entertainment centers to a different place in town and will also work towards installation of more street lights.
Representatives from Thimphu Thromde, Department of Trade, National comission for Children and Women, Bhutan Infocomm and Media Authority, media, NGO’s, SCO’s, Bhutan Chamber of Commerce and Industry, local government leaders, private security, TCB and Ministries were part of the meeting.
The police Chief said that with the increase in number of population and rural urban migration, the crime is bound to increase anyhow. On the other hand, he said that the strength of police force remains the same. “We have to intelligently evolve to conduct smart policing because we cannot increase the number of police personnel to cut down the crimes which is why we have come up with the initiative called ILP.
ILP consist traditional policing, community policing, problem oriented policing (POP) and computer statistic policing among others. He said, “For now what they are doing is traditional policing which is standard form of policing and it is very affective. However, this alone cannot bring crime rates down in the country.”
He said that they are using the data collected so far on the crime and criminals with the aim to target criminals, study the crime patterns and to monitor the movements of criminals to different Dzongkhags.
He said, “Until now we have been following the same policing method and we have been doing rounds without focusing on the right direction. Now, we will be doing a crime mapping so that we can depict and focus more on the direction where more of the crimes are being committed.”
Those are the intelligent ways of diversifying the resources they have, he said, adding that, they will not do anything blindly. “This can also address the shortage of man power in police. Our focus will be more on criminals and not on the crime”, he added.
In addition, some of the objectives are to enhance public safety, integrate crime data analysis and criminal intelligence functions, influencing mindsets (police and public) and realign strategic and operational framework to deliver client oriented crime prevention and disruption of crime.
