Community Policing: Bali

By Wombat | March 24th, 2006 | No Comments

I posted an article a few days ago about the government in Jakarta toying with the idea of introducing community policing in Java and other islands. There were two articles in the JP about this idea for the island of Bali. I Wayan Juniartha reports from Denpasar.

Bringing the police closer to the community
I Wayan Juniartha, The Jakarta Post, Denpasar, Bali

The audience erupted in laughter when I Made Arya Bhakti, a simple young man from the village of Les in northern Bali, opened his presentation with an innocent remark.

“Thank you for the community policing program. Without this program, I wouldn’t have the chance to sit and speak at the same table as the vice governor of Bali,” he said.

Next to him, the vice governor of Bali, Alit Kelakan smiled in acknowledgement.

Arya Bhakti and Alit Kelakan were two of the four speakers in the seminar on community policing recently in Denpasar. It was held to mark the completion of the local NGO, Manikaya Kauci’s community policing program in Bali.
With financial assistance provided by the Asia Foundation, Manikaya Kauci has been working on a community policing program since early 2004. The program provides an opportunity for local people, including Arya Bhakti, to assist their respective villages.

As the coordinator of the local community policing working group (Pokja), Arya Bhakti was responsible for promoting and maintaining a good, working relationship between his fellow villagers and the local police.

“It is not an easy task, particularly when you have to facilitate different security groups, such as the police and the village’s Pecalang (traditional guardsmen), which have different values and codes, to work together as a unified force,” he said.

“But it has been quite a rewarding task, giving those involved a sense of accomplishment, of having done your bit to make your community a better and safer place in which to live,” he added.

The program is aimed at creating a beneficial synergy between the police and the local community. Manikaya Kauci’s executive director, Gunadjar, pointed out that community policing was built upon five principles.

“A deep respect toward human rights and democratic values, encouraging the participation of people, a transparent attitude toward information, responsiveness and accountability,” he explained.

Unfortunately, a wide gap of distrust and misunderstanding has separated the Indonesian Police and regular civilians for decades. Much of the gap has been due to the police’s militaristic operating procedures, coupled with an arrogant attitude toward civilians. It was further widened by the people’s apathetic or, sometimes, violent responses toward the police and their attitudes.

In order to create synergy, the gap needs to be eliminated first. “That is our most important role. NGO is the third party that could assist the police in embracing a new paradigm as well as persuade the people to shed their distrust toward the uniformed force,” Gunadjar said.

The community policing program commenced in March 2004. Manikaya Kauci selected six villages, namely Medewi, Pulukan, Les, Julah, Nyuhtebel and Manggis, as the program’s pilot projects. It sent a team of experts to each village to introduce the villagers with the principles of community policing and to assist them in forging a network with the local police.

“We spent many memorable evenings chatting with those villagers at coffee stalls, bale banjar (neighborhood hall) or at their houses. It was the best job I have ever had,” a member of the team Saichu Anwar.

The teams, known in the villages as the “initiators”, assisted the locals in establishing a Pokja. They utilized the traditional community gathering of Sangkepan and Mebligbagan as a catalyst for the establishment of the Pokja.

“Once the Pokja was established, we stepped aside and let the villagers to do the next steps,” Saichu said.

Through a series of meetings, the Pokja then identified the village’s security-related problems, devised appropriate solutions for those problems and designed the village’s security system. The system should integrate the formal security agencies, such as the police, the civilian defense unit (Hansip) and the village’s auxiliary security force (Bankamdes) with the informal or traditional ones, such as the Pecalang.

“We motivated the local police officers to actively participate in this stage, sharing their expertise and knowledge with the villagers,” Gunadjar said.

“The participation of the police officers in my village had resulted in a clear distribution of tasks and authorities among the formal and informal security bodies,” Arya Bhakti noted.

Manikaya Kauci had also organized several training programs, including a crime detection program, to improve the capability of the police officer as well as the villagers.

By the completion of the program in March 2006, Manikaya Kauci had conducted a series of discussions that involved the total of 386 people and trained 27 facilitators, including six active police officers, who now had the necessary skills and knowledge to establish and maintain a community policing program.

Moreover, Manikaya Kauci had also designed and produced a 60-page learning module on community policing. It provided a step-by-step guidance on how to start and operate a village-level community policing program.

“It explains in great details the critical steps of building community support, establishing a cooperation network with the police, designing a program, locating financial resource for the program and constructing a reliable evaluation method,” Gunadjar said.

The former vice chief of Bali Police, Insp. Gen. Teguh Soedarsono considered the module as an important tool in the development of community policing program.

“It will serve as a guidance for those police officers, who wish to transform the force into an integral part of our society,” he said.

By the end of this year, Manikaya Kauci was expected to print and distribute some 500 free-of-charge copies of the module to the villages and police stations across Bali. Currently, there are around 1,500 Pekraman (customary villages) all over Bali. “The module will facilitate the dissemination of community policing principles all across the island,” Gunadjar said.

The vice governor of Bali, Alit Kelakan praised the community policing program as “a critical step in enhancing the ability of the Balinese in preventing crimes and terrorism.”

He recalled the two brutal terrorist attacks as a grim example of the island’s need for better, comprehensive security system that seamlessly integrate and unify the resources of various elements of the island’s society.

“When we have such system, when the police work hand in hand with the informal security agencies, the villages, the government and the private sectors then it will be very difficult, if not impossible at all, for the criminal and terrorist elements to enter to and operate in the island undetected,” he said.