<B>About Community police project</B>

Police de Proximité: un gang de voleurs demantelé après 115 vols. Your article of March 14, 2007 is a perfect example of community policing.

For some time now, Mauritian news headlines is rampant with crime and social deviances of all sorts. To any person looking from outside, like myself, this is creating an unhealthy environment to live and bring up children in. Let alone the bad publicity it creates. Tourists are looted, raped, killed, further reinforcing this negative publicity. We, like many others, are concerned about the family we have left behind.

Crime and misdeaminor is a man-made thing, nothing of the sort of natural calamity we hear of like the ones in Indonesia. In my opinion, the solution should be man-made, social and communal.

The police should not be the scape-goat and the easy culprit of all wrongs. There are, we admit, a few deviants who should not necessarily be representative of the whole police force. The police are already having a lot to do with the limited resources they have. Give the devil his due.

I would, for the sake of my country, propose a much stronger system of community policing. This is a project, which may be tried on a pilot basis. The details like recruitment, profiling, training, recognition, etc are some aspects of the project, which need to be looked into. There should be a police-community partnership and trust.

The market may be broken down into segments or zones ? university campus, residential areas, regions, stretch of road, etc.

I am confident that this project will work if able men like yourselves get together and think positively of a cleaner Mauritius.

A .Soochit</B>