Editorial
Police killed again
Revamp modus operandi
We regret the death of yet another policeman. This time it happened in a remote village in Koira upazilla of Khulna. The unfortunate policeman was part of a police contingent that went to apprehend some Jamaat-Shibir cadres accused of committing violence in Khulna recently.
Koira is one incident of several that have occurred since 28 February, where police contingents have been subjected to attacks by locals while maintaining law and order. And that is what begs the question. Suffering casualties in their ranks is enervating and might tell on police psyche eventually. And thus the Koira incident should be addressed seriously.
In Koira it was the villagers who aided the accused and eventually managed to wrest two of them from police custody. In fact, given the current development in the country, one would have expected the opposite. If it did not happen, we believe that it had everything to do with the negative image of the police that has been created in the public mind because of the excesses it had carried out in recent times, especially the number of deaths from police firing. And added to it, the police as well as the administration has failed to make the public aware of what the law enforcing agencies are doing and why and have not engaged the public in stemming Jamaat's violence.
In the Koira incident perhaps the size of the contingent was acceptable, but the police was out of sync with the realities on ground. They should have known the psyche of the local people obtaining at that time and gone with a larger force or adopted a different technique.
There is a need to re-look at police tactics. First, there have been several direct attacks on the police resulting in a number of deaths Certainly, ever since the spate of violence started, there has been a big question mark on the way the police have used excessive force to control the crowds. The finesse is in controlling the crowd with as little coercion and as few casualties as possible. That ability needs to be restored.
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