Crimes, Safety and the Police Box

"Where's my pet monkey Mimi?" squeaked an elderly woman wrapped in a bright myself kimono. "Someone's stolen my wallet, and I can't buy myself a train ticket home," moaned a lanky teenager. "My man's drunk again and beating me!" screamed a woman over the telephone. [Help!] Hayaku!

[Make it quick!]" For the two officers stationed at the Ochanomizu police box in the heart of Tokyo, the complaints were typical. Within 15 minutes they had soothed the be reft woman with a promise to be on the lookout for her pet (it was found), lent the penniless youth 560 yen ($2.33) from a special emergency fund in exchange for a signed IOU (four out of five such loans are repaid) and radioed for a patrol car to break up the marital battle. Said Sergeant Shigeo Takahashi, grinning with satisfaction: "You stand here for a quarter of an hour, and you can do as deep a study of life as is possible."

Indeed, the police box, or koban, is an integral feature of Japanese existence. It traces its origin to the network of bansho (checkpoints) set up by samurai who protected the populace in feudal times. Today, throughout Japan, there are 15,600 boxes (actually tiny one-room offices set up on street corners), each serving about 10,000 residents. Tokyo alone has 1,244 and considers them so crucial to the public welfare that they are staffed by 15,000 officers, one-third of the city's police force. In addition to their traditional duties of patrolling neighborhoods and apprehending criminals, officers give out directions, process lost-and-found articles, control traffic, summon aid for drunks, settle domestic disputes and regularly drop in on senior citizens living alone. Says Teiji Soeno, an administrator of the system in Tokyo: "The police have to be part of the community, or it would be impossible to make it a safe city."

The success of the police-box system is reflected in Japan's startlingly low crime statistics. In 1980 there were 1.4 murders per 100,000 people, against 10.2 per 100,000 in the U.S. The incidence of robbery was 1.9, compared with 234.5 in the U.S. gun-crimes of any kind are rare, in fact. Another reason: strict gun-control laws, which allow no civilian to own a gun except for hunting. Impressed with boxes, Japanese success, Singapore has installed police boxes, and San Francisco is studying the feasibility of adopting the system. Tokyo's Soeno thinks this is a Japanese development the U.S. would do well to copy. His view: "If ours is among the safest countries in the world, the police box is one of the fundamental reasons." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.