In an attempt to contain the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19) within its ranks, the Bhopal Police have moved 2,100 personnel — the entire City Police — to hotels near their place of work. The department has also rejigged its deployment strategy, with a focus on dealing with curfew violations and quelling apprehensions about quarantine, as the incidence of normally reported crimes has come down.
“Policemen were getting infected at the workplace, and taking the illness to their families, who were then spreading it in the neighbourhood. This way, other places could get infected, too. So, it became important to break the chain of contact between workplace and home,” said Upendra Jain, Bhopal Additional Director General of Police.
Declared hotspots
As cases spiral in Bhopal, 12 policemen and their seven family members have been infected too. The police believe the personnel contracted the illness while on duty within the Jahangirabad and the Aishbagh Police Station limits, where most of the 20 infected members of the Tablighi Jamaat, who had returned from the meeting at the Nizamuddin centre, were found. Their contact is yet to be conclusively established, but the stations have been declared hotspots.
Enforcing the lockdown, supplying food to the poor and dispelling rumours, as the threat of infection looms large on each personnel on duty, has sprung a novel challenge for the police. This has prompted an overhaul in the approach, to ensure safety of citizens, while ensuring they don’t get infected themselves.
To avert the risk of contracting the illness, personnel can directly reach their beat from hotels instead of reporting at stations first and must observe strict social distancing at police stations, which are sanitised regularly. During patrolling, only one official can ride a two-wheeler and at most two can drive a vehicle. And officials above 55 years, who are more vulnerable, have been deployed at back-up jobs, and not on the frontline.
Many fronts
The police, according to Bhopal South Superintendent of Police Sai Krishna Thota, within whose jurisdiction the policemen contracted the illness, are fighting on many fronts — ensuring lockdowns in sweltering heat, acting on calls about people breaking quarantine, stress panics among people and preventing any law and order situations.
Regular crime had almost come down to zero since the lockdown was imposed, he said. Now, the police are mostly dealing with curfew violations, accidents and crimes of passion. “But those requiring planning and execution have reduced,” he said.
“Stress is inevitable, more so for the police,” he wrote on Twitter, admitting it was a new experience for the administration too. There is the psychological pressure about getting infected, seeing colleagues getting infected, keeping heavily-visited police premises infection-free, the lack of sleep and rest at times, and eating on time.
Adapting to challenges
“We are in a constant mode of taking action and correcting them, no tried and tested ways are available,” he wrote. The police are adjusting to changing directives as the systems adapt to challenges.
Staying away from family fearing you will infect family members adds to the pressure. “We have allowed personnel one meal at their homes, that too while they sit at a distance from the family,” he said.
To lend psychological support to personnel, the police have roped in a prominent Bopal-based doctor, who takes counselling sessions for an hour each day to quell their apprehensions about the illness and guide them with ways to combat it.
During the outbreak, he said, the police were seeing the difference between policy-making and enforcement. “Once it was decided that vegetables would be allowed to be sold as an essential commodity, the number of vegetable vendors increased. Even tea vendors, cobblers and barbers became vegetable vendors,” he said.
On the phone
On the Dial 100 service, he said, two kinds of calls kept them busy — those with complaints of others breaking a rule or violating quarantine or those complaining of a someone who had returned from abroad, say, even two-three months ago.
“People are apprehensive. We get to hear queries about using face masks. Some ask us whether it is okay to step out to visit a hospital for a simple illness. The instruction is clear about that — people can step out only in the case of emergencies,” he said.
Exercising further precaution, the police have gradually shifted most coordination work to the phone in the past ten days. Even tracing contacts was being done this way.
