Mr Reddi has also created a mobile police force of over 1.83 lakh citizens
MN Reddi
BENGALURU: Police Commissioner M.N. Reddi is a man of character – 140 characters, to be precise! The city’s top cop has given policing a new meaning since he took over the hot seat in August last year, and has replaced the old traditional methods of ‘danda’ policing with the Twitter handle. He is solely responsible for giving the police force a jazzier edge in this Tech Capital. With over a million followers on the microblogging site, Mr Reddi has also created a mobile police force of over 1.83 lakh citizens, better known as citizen informants, by engaging them and narrowing the gap between the force and citizens.
Sitting at his office on Saturday morning, Mr Reddi feels confident that he can reach out to the public and instill confidence in them that the city police force was with them. “Bengalureans live in constant fear of their safety and security. All we need to do as a force is to give them that assurance, a friendly pat on the shoulder saying, ‘Don’t worry, we’re here for you. Your safety is our prime concern’,” he says.
His 20-member team at the command centre constantly monitors his Twitter handle and responds immediately to complaints. Over 80% of all the complaints registered on the police commissioner’s social networking sites, like Twitter, Facebook and Whatsapp, have been addressed. The idea behind setting up a separate command unit was to specifically look at the complaints received through the social media sites, and to respond them in time.
“Soon after taking charge in August 2014, my aim was to reach out to the citizens on a wider platform and to change the negative mindset of people that the police force was of no use. It was a big challenge. To make us a citizen police, we went back to the basics and started policing the police. We told our men that safety and security are our primary concern,” he says.
There has been no looking back since then for Mr Reddi, who is arguably the first police officer in the country to use social media as a tool to bring in transparency in the system. He has allowed Bengalureans to register complaints on Twitter and has solved some of those cases at a remarkable speed. Within a few months of the police opening the doors through Twitter Samvad, over 1.83 lakh people have started following his twitrer handle.
Mr Reddi says, “Technology is more at play today and social media platforms are where you find people chatting and exchanging messages. If you notice, people nowadays talk less and text more from their phones. I thought why not to tap into that and create a platform where the police can establish a direct contact with the public.”
Mr Reddi’s engagement with innovation and technology is not new. B-TRAC came into existence after he, then a DCP traffic and security, attended an International Traffic Summit in 2006 in Amsterdam. After looking at the traffic management system being run at the capital of the Netherlands, he decided to have a similar mechanism in Bengaluru. Mr Reddi says, “I was bowled over by the way traffic was being managed from one centre in Amsterdam. I decided that after my return, I will work along the same lines. I took two months to prepare a report and sent it to then DG&IGP, Dr Ajai Kumar Singh, who forwarded it to the government. The cost of the project was estimated to be Rs 350 crore with funding from both central and state governments. We launched the Enforcement Automation Centre then,” he says.
He is happy to helm the progression of his idea. Now, the traffic police are working on B-Trac Phase II, which is in its initial stages of implementation. Mr Reddi, a no-nonsense officer, has taken a serious view of recent cases of fake complaints being reported on Twitter.
( Source : dc )
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