While there probably isn’t any free lemonade being given away, a community policing initiative by Jakarta police aimed at quelling drug dealing and associated violence in a neighbourhood notorious for such activities has some similarities with a scheme in Minneapolis I wrote about last month.

Police in the north of Minnesota’s capital closed off half a street with room for a basketball hoop, allowed passers-by to talk to police and receive free lemonade, all the while being positioned near a major drug-dealing hot spot.

Jakarta police are setting up two tents in the busy area of Kebon Pala in the east of Indonesia’s capital. According to the Jakarta Post, it is “a crowded area and a safe haven for drug dealers, couriers and users” and being close to a highway enables “people to come and go easily.” As a result, residents were understandably scared to hang around outside too long. But not even their houses were necessarily safe, with drug dealers commandeering local homes to get away from police raids. And despite these raids, drug dealing didn’t abate.

And so, in mid-July, police decided to change their self-described “hit-and-run approach”. The tents will be manned by dozens of police and anti-drug activists every day. The initiative will aim at:

* heightening the police’s presence in the area and hopefully augment the public’s feeling of security and trust in the police as a result;
* providing anti-drug counselling services and consultation;
* imploring mothers to stop their kids from dealing drugs; and,
* providing immunity for drug users if they inform on drug dealers, although they will have to report to police regularly.

On the face of it this sounds like an overall positive move, as long as procedures are in place to ensure information coming from informants is accurate before moving on alleged drug dealers. Of course, there is always the chance that this might just mean that drug dealing and violence shifts to different areas in the city. But absent major public policy decisions being made on how better to tackle the issue of illegal drugs in Indonesia, this kind of approach might just help more than it will harm.

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