The police could make greater use of an “overwatch” strategy to increase psychological pressure on potential offenders and counteract burnout in police officers, a security specialist said, as more police are being deployed in the wake of a deadly knife attack in Taipei on Dec. 19.
President William Lai (賴清德) and Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) have instructed police to increase their use of visible policing in crowded places to prevent attacks similar to the one on Dec. 19, when four people were killed, including the alleged attacker.
In an article published on Friday on the Web site of the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, Su Tzu-yun (蘇紫雲), a research fellow at the institute, acknowledged the high-visibility strategy was effective at deterring attacks.
Photo: CNA
The strategy, which creates psychological pressure on potential perpetrators, is commonly used at airports and other transportation hubs in the US and Europe, he said.
The US Transportation Security Administration and British law enforcement organizations have doctrines of highly visible and unpredictable deployments to prevent terrorism and other crimes, Su wrote.
The downside of the strategy is that intensive, public-level patrolling can exhaust police personnel, Su said, especially in places such as Taiwan where officer numbers are already low.
An investigation of the Dec. 19 attacks, which occurred in or near Taiwan’s MRT system, found that mass transit police were slow to respond because of staffing shortages and scheduling issues that left many stations without any police presence.
Although staffing is being increased, Su said there was a less personnel-intensive way to execute the high-visibility strategy.
“What is more crucial than the number of officers deployed or patrol density is how to be seen,” Su wrote.
For transport hubs, which are symbolic and high-density critical infrastructure, security effectiveness often depends on whether elevated vantage points are used effectively,” he wrote.
Guidelines such as the International Civil Aviation Organization’s Aviation Security Manual and the UK’s Airport Security Planning Quick Guide recommend that visible officers be positioned on upper floors and mezzanines, in observation corridors or at intersections of passenger flows, Su wrote.
From these locations, officers can observe large areas while remaining visible to travelers at multiple levels, achieving psychological deterrence and broad surveillance without impeding movement, Su said.
For potential attackers, the sight of officers positioned above them conveys the message that they are already being observed, which is often enough to deter or delay an attack, Su said.
Compared with ground patrols, officers stationed at elevated points can more easily detect suspicious loitering or other patterns, making this approach particularly effective against lone-actor attacks, Su said.
Importantly, it achieves a low-disruption, high-deterrence effect without checkpoints or an oppressive atmosphere, a method commonly seen at major international airports, Su wrote.
By enhancing visibility through vantage-point deployments, the need for extensive foot patrols can be reduced, conserving the limited pool of uniformed bodies while reinforcing the perception of order and safety, he wrote.
This approach could be a useful reference for metro systems, railways and security planning for large-scale events such as New Year’s celebrations, he wrote.
Although Su believed deploying police officers at elevation could save personnel, the problem of the general lack of police officers in, for example, Taipei’s Rapid Transit Division, would have to be addressed. The division is responsible for covering 117 stations but can only field 80 officers at a time.
To deal with the broader staffing shortage, Samuel Lin (林書立), an assistant professor in Ming Chuan University’s Department of Criminal Justice, said technological fixes, such as AI surveillance, tracking systems, and scenario simulations, could all enhance overall security requiring more personnel.
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