Private Police vs. Policing Communities in Kathmandu

We see private companies offer security services to elite interests in Kathmandu. One reason why the private policing companies are today more apparent and prominent is that the mobility of elites has increased; it is unknown where elites may find themselves in Kathmandu, and so the regular police is incapable of providing the same kinds of protection and necessary surveillance as a private unit in direct contact with the elites would. The mobility of elites in Kathmandu, their loss of direction, place and purpose, signals a weakened position of elites as they traverse the streets looking for opportunities to make money, or to re-kindle their desire for investment. But re-kindling desire may take very long, even though it is an integral part of a slow process of economic recovery. In Lacan we see plenty of writing on desire, but even he is unable to offer a quick, short-run solution as to how precisely desire may be born or re-kindled once it has been lost. It seems re-kindling desire is a long-term concern for the economy, which means that its loss becomes a major problem. 

Nevertheless, absent of desire, a 'scavenging attitude' in the weakened elites is in play (they become like vultures), the elites have become today more desperate, and so their encroachment is now into more riskier terrain, their constant look for opportunities leading them to more criminal places. The regular ways of making money cease to be reliable, and the elites are led towards criminal places and even participating in criminal activities, becoming the target of crime themselves and hence needing protection. The knowledge objects (reports, surveys, video files) formed in the surveillance of the community will be very valuable for elites who seek to invest into Kathmandu, meaning that the private police force is utilized as a research arm of an elite capitalist endeavor. The private police force is nothing other than a morphing of economic interests with security concerns. 

On the other hand, we also have in Kathmandu's communities the development of a 'policing community' of actors aware of the persistent threats in their communities; the 'community-turned-police' is evident in some Kathmandu communities today and could become a trend among more communities. The evidences of the policing community are the prominent message-posts on public walls that say that a certain community has a “safety siren” in place, meaning that the community is policing and protecting itself through multiple panopticons, that is, with all houses in a neighborhood becoming a panopticon with its own local area of monitoring. A policing community is a commendable step towards realizing that the state police's harsh punishments are not desired in close-knit communities. In a policing community, the punishment administered for an 'internal' deviant would not be imprisonment or fines, but cultural ostracizing and dialogue-based confrontation.

In a policing community, root social and psychological causes of crime are more easily addressed than in state police prisons, effort and funds are not expended on solving the crime but on the rehabilitating of the deviant who has quickly been discovered because his/her signature habits are known; the policing role utilizes psychology and sociology more than the state police in order to get a grasp of the deviant behaviors, habits and potential plans that can then be addressed. Indeed, even the study of 'micro-economics' of the community becomes important, as the study of the rise and fall of the fortunes of the small community can help identify when a criminal activity is likely to occur. In this way, a more complete knowledge of the community is developed, but such a knowledge is not centralized to one authority figure, there is no central male patriarch of the community in charge, but, in a very important revolution, housewives, the unemployed, the unwell have all become the most important members of a policing community, observing as they can from their windows and becoming important as witnesses to criminal activity. When a crime does occur, for the community police the crime becomes a signal that a lot of things in the entire community are amiss, and each particular feature of the community is brought up to evaluation in the aftermath of a crime, and so once again a type of 'maternal involvement' with the community is evident, with the key motive being concern and not suspicion. What is at stake for the community police is not just this or that minor law which the state police is concerned with, but Law as such, the combination of all laws (a murder reveals a frustrating littering problem which could be connected to the murder...), which is the combined 'Law' in the sense of the Lacanian "Name of the Father," the Law of the need to protect the whole symbolic order from all kinds of threats, in other words, the Law of having to submit to other lesser laws, to submit to castration in the name of law if one is to continue to live in society. 

But what is important to note, in conclusion, is that the private police of the elites and the community-level policing activities of the rest are not to be understood as a part of a single increase in police activity, inspired by the perception of a common threat, but rather, private police and community police can be in opposition to one another. The elites, desperate and scavenging for ways to do business, are on the offensive in the communities, where their striving for knowledge knows no bounds, their desire for investment once again slowly re-kindled by the empty neighborhoods signalling potential, emptied not by their own private police's presence but because of the community police. The communities, on the defensive, are ever alert towards any sign of disturbance to their independence. The investment process works precisely by the nullifying of threats over a certain territory, for it is clear in warfare that the standing army is only a concern for a limited period of time, after which the job of nullifying other criminal elements in the conquered territory takes effect so that the territory can become economically viable. But the problem is that elite investment, and the drive towards investment, disturbs the independence of the communities.