Stop whining, start shining

 

I guess this must be so in other departments. In Police, throughout my career, I kept hearing why the politicians and IAS officers wouldn’t let Police reforms happen so the Policing in India continues to be in a sorry state. Frankly, those big-ticket Police reforms as mandated by the Supreme Court are beyond our control but there are a plethora of reforms we should have done by now if we had not been enslaved by the colonial systems and mindset. 

It is entirely within the powers of the SP or DCP to make the process of registering an FIR easier and more transparent. What does it cost to just tell the officers to register each single complaint? Horrible proliferation in number of cases. Does it matter for promotion or posting? We think it does but it doesn’t. When I joined a district as SP, there was a ceremonial hand-over, a sort of passing the baton from the previous SP to me. All the SHOs of the Police Stations and their supervisors attended to witness. And assess the new incumbent, i.e., me! After the event, and after the predecessor left, I found the guys crowding around so I thought they expected some pearls of wisdom to issue forth from my lips. I scratched my head to come up with something and then told them, look, I don’t want any suppression or minimisation. Any complaint that comes should be registered and under the proper section of law. The expression on their collective face was a picture. Then I told them, all warranties must be arrested and that would be a primary focus during the monthly Crime Conference. Till date, I remember the consternation on their faces. 

Words have consequences. 

In the first month of my assuming charge, the number of dacoities in that small district was four. Compared to four dacoities in the entire previous year. I panicked. If I managed to hike that most heinous of crimes, dacoity, from 4 to 48 in a year, where would I be? I made bold to call the one who was above us all, the Director General & Inspector General of Police and told him. He was intrigued and asked why I was telling him such mundane things. I said there was a request: four dacoities were reported in the previous year, I’d “achieved” four in the first month – could he kindly consider only the detection rate and not the numbers, please? He was non-committal. Unfortunately, none of the four cases in the previous year had been detected; the four cases in my first month were not only detected but about 90 % of the property robbed was recovered. I tried telling the DGP but by then, these were mere statistics for him. Meanwhile, crimes against property declined in the district and I was kind of sitting pretty. 

What happens if you commit a crime and disappear? The cops try for a while and then submit a chargesheet showing you as absconder. The Magistrate then issues a warrant for your arrest.  This is sent to the same Police Station where the crime was committed. You become a warranty. Executing a warrant is the least of priorities for an SHO and it’s just a statistic. Every month, during the Crime Conference, the SP or DCP checks how many warrants were disposed off and how many new ones were received and whether, on balance, the SHO is ahead of the game. So, if a particular warrant is never executed/ disposed off, there’s practically no accountability and the criminal gets away scot-free ... 

I checked the number of warranties and it turned out to be 163. This looked like a low number. I collected the details from the Court records and the actual figure turned out to be 5,617. In the monthly reports, I submitted that figure to my higher-ups and, immediately, there was a query as to how I’d managed to increase the crimes so much within one month of my joining. I replied suitably and was rewarded with further scathing “queries.” Until I left the district, these queries and replies continued and for all I know, they may still be going on, 24 years hence. 

Be that as it may, I set about arresting these people in right earnest. 

I found an able partner-in-crime (actually, partner-in-crime-control) in a young officer who was under training in the district. He told me that he was examining the warrants at a Police Station but the moment he touched one particular warrant, everybody was shivering. It was in the name of one Haren Bishu (name changed). I enquired and found out that he was the right-hand man of the local big leader of the ruling party. When the Chief Minister came visiting, he drove the CM’s car. And so on. There were reportedly seven warrants against him. The courts had given scathing observations and orders regarding non-execution of the warrants. When the local leader met me the next day for something else, I told him about the warrants and asked him to get him to surrender. He hemmed and hawed and went away. Two days later, Haren Bishu was detained on a routine traffic offence and the SHO rang me up. I told him to immediately produce him in Court against the warrants. About an hour or two later, I went on a round of the town to check if there was any disturbance. I found all the shops closed and not a single person on the road in that bustling town. Concerned, I asked one shopkeeper (about to close his shop) as to what the problem was and why the roads were vacant. He said, everyone had gone to the Court to witness Haren Bishu’s arrest – it was such a huge event! It turned out there were actually not seven but 23 warrants pending against him, all for heinous crimes like murder, arson and so on. And, he had never been arrested. Next day onwards, there were queues of people waiting to surrender in the courts against their warrants. It made my life a little easier. 

These are small measures but can cause problems for the SP, generally in terms of transfers. I also saw some unseasonal transfers and attempts at transfers. “Lekin, itne badliyon ke baad bhi, hum nahi badle …” 

[Stop whining, start shining]

Lies, damned lies

 

A few days back, some media reports and WhatsApp groups made much of the fact that as per NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau), Kolkata is the safest city in India for the second year in a row. The reports stated that the total number of cases slid from 18,277 in 2020 to 14,591 in 2021. A report like this should have made me feel good. It scared the daylights out of me. 

Years ago, in Delhi, while I was fresh in service, I received a call from a University Professor’s wife who was a family friend. The Professor was out of station and she wanted to lodge an FIR regarding a theft in her house. She was in raw panic over going to a Police Station. Even when I offered to send my brother to accompany her to the Police Station, she was reluctant. She wanted a Police officer she knew to accompany her so that she would not be harassed. Most law – abiding citizens think several times before visiting a Police Station.

 

An MIT study in an Indian state found that more than 70 per cent of crime victims never reported incidents because many felt that the police would either do nothing or ask for a bribe to file a complaint. More than 80 per cent said no constable had ever visited their neighbourhood. This is despite a 24/7 work hour for most police officers and fairly safe neighbourhoods. Rather than playing victim, we, the Police and ex-Police should acknowledge that there is a problem. People just do not trust us. One of the main reasons is the almost absolute impossibility of lodging an FIR under the appropriate sections of law without “contacts.”

 

As per law, even if there is a false or frivolous complaint, police is duty-bound to lodge an FIR. Only after registering an FIR, they can refuse investigation with written reasons; they can file a report as complaint being true but sufficient evidence could not be collected (FRT); they can file a report that there was a mistake of fact in the complaint (FRMF); and they can file a report that the complaint was false (FRF) and prosecute the complainant. Absent the above, the Police officer should, and must, submit a Charge Sheet (CS). The option they just do not have is not to file an FIR.

 

On the other hand, all over the country, much energy and ingenuity is spent in avoiding the registration of the FIR. Remember the film, “Pink,” where the victims were given a royal run-around as to where to register the FIR? Even that is illegal. Any complainant, approaching any police station, should be able to lodge the FIR there. It is the Police station’s duty to transfer the case to the appropriate police station, after registering the FIR.

 

Why does this happen? Part of the reason is reports and inferences like this NCRB report. NCRB has reported the data as has been received by it. There is no way of knowing how authentic this data is, given such rampant suppression and minimisation. As such, there is no way the data of a city can be compared with the data of another city as the rates of suppression (non-registration of case), minimisation (registration of case under a diluted section of law) and non-reporting of cases vary from city to city and state to state. It cannot also reflect any trend because the rates do not stay the same over time in any place – it depends on the attitude of the leadership, both political and Police, active citizenry demanding accountability, judicial activism and so on. From NCRB figures which are based on such spurious inputs to concluding that a particular city is safe, safer or safest is a gigantic leap of faith. Unfortunately, such headlines and chest-thumping create their own hangover and the figures become sticky upward. Thus, the Police of a city gets hoist on its own petard and will try its level best to keep the figures below previous “achievement,” even if artificially, by simply not recording the cases or by diluting the sections of law.

 

Even without NCRB report, because of the obsession with crime data, every officer would like to keep the figures below his predecessor’s. This is inherently flawed because, if things are transparent, there is no way the crime figures would come down. The population is increasing. The basic reasons behind crime, greed, depravity, economic conditions, police-population ratio, etc. – none of it is showing any improvement. Real justice keeps getting more and more distant, given the burgeoning backlog of cases with the Courts and the Police. Conviction rates remain abysmal.

 

There is also the fear of the system being overwhelmed. The number of Police for 1,00,000 population in India is one of the lowest amongst comparable countries in the world, 152 against the UN norm of 222. The ratio in some of the countries are: Italy (456), Mexico (465), France (422), Germany (336), Pakistan (182), Singapore (810), USA (239), UK (212) and Belgium (334). Many Police officers fear that registering the FIRs without filtration would lead to too many false and frivolous cases being registered, further depleting an already stretched out police force. 

Are these assumptions correct?

Partly through force of circumstances and partly through personal commitment, in 2007, a young SP did something radical in his district, Jalpaiguri – it became known as the “Jalpaiguri experiment.”  In the teeth of severe opposition by his subordinates and superiors, he mandated that all complaints be registered, whether true, false, debatable, whatever. He also started taking action against officers who tried to suppress or minimise. As apprehended, the crime figures in the district shot up immediately, by more than four times, from a monthly average of 249 cases to 1060 cases. However, guess what, the heavens didn’t fall! The disposal of cases doubled. Contrary to apprehensions, there was no significant increase in the number of false or frivolous cases. The court cases reduced drastically. People used to approach the courts because they were not getting the desired remedy at the Police station. When FIRs were registered freely and properly, there was no need for them to go to the courts. The number of persons who surrendered in the Courts went up from a monthly average of 113 to 496. This, in fact, led to a slight decrease in the number of arrests. This indicated that there is a natural tendency for accused persons to submit to the majesty of law unless the eco-system is vitiated by suppression and minimisation. Finally, the conviction rate doubled.

At most, if by some miracle, Police becomes suddenly super-efficient, the rate of increase of cases might come down. Actual reduction in the absolute figures may indicate that there is “efficient” suppression and minimisation or there is gross under-reporting. This would lead to smugness on the part of policy makers, lack of respect of the citizenry for rule of law, apathy, goonda raj and complete vitiation of the fabric of society. After a point, this leads to the public taking law unto their own hands, public lynching, etc.. Decline in absolute number of Police cases scares me.

Return of the cop and the bribe

 

The views and the responses around the previous blogpost have prompted me to add a sequel.

Once I was sitting at a Police Station when a local leader walked in with information and desire for information. After his need for information regarding arrest of some of his supporters and action on his complaints was satiated, he launched into a diatribe on all that was wrong with everything around him. He raved and ranted about how the PWD engineers were indulging in corruption on an unimaginable scale, how much the general public was duped by them and so on. I asked him why then he always targeted the Police in his critical speeches all the time and never mentioned PWD. He said if he talked about even grand corruption by any other department, people might hear but would not listen. On the other hand, even petty corruption by Police strikes a familiar chord with his audience. As a leader, he needed to say what the people wanted to hear. This is one of the reasons Police corruption is talked about so much – corruption by the Police is much more visible. However, that doesn’t wish away the problem. Whether corruption is more in the Police than in other departments and agencies or less, Police corruption is a stark reality.

How and why does the Police corruption take place? Actually, Police functioning is one of the most supervised government services. The rules and regulations are watertight, the inspection and monitoring systems are rigorous and there are layers upon layers of supervision. Why then? Part of the answer (but not the whole answer, by any means) lies in the origins of Policing in India.

During Mughal rule, there was only rudimentary policing although terms like Daroga, Kotwal, etc. seem to be of Mughal origin. During this period and early British rule, the Policing function did not command a salary. The person entrusted with the job used to collect cash and kind from the population and traders in his area to pay the compensations for himself and his staff. The biggest source of income used to be the weekly haats (markets) and thus hafta became synonymous with Police corruption.

For a while, the zamindars were held responsible for the crimes committed in their areas. Lord Cornwalis reforms of 1792 removed this responsibility but tasked the zamindars to report crimes. This created an anomalous situation as crimes and criminals became a major source of income for the zamindars and it was in their interest not to report the crimes. When the Policing was organized along more professional lines, the accountability to the public was conspicuous by its absence in the ethos and the working. With that background and the constant need to keep the official crime figures down, suppression and minimization of crimes/ cases got deeply entrenched in the Police DNA even though as per law, every complaint, even a false one, is mandated to be recorded as an FIR. In case of a false complaint, there are provisions to prosecute the complainant, but only after registering the FIR. Police can refuse investigation but only after due documentation and recording valid reasons in writing. There is no discretion to refuse to even accept a complaint. Unfortunately, this “unavailable” discretion is used for serious corruption.

When I was an IPS probationer and was visiting my brother studying in Delhi, his bicycle got stolen. I accompanied him to the Police Station to lodge a complaint. Then I realized how difficult it was to register an FIR in India. It would be hours before the duty officer would even look at you. If and when he does, he would bark rudely as to why you’re disturbing him. This particular duty officer demanded Rs. 100 to lodge the FIR. When I introduced myself as an IPS probationer, he said, “Aarey aap toh ghar ke hain, 50 rupaya mein ho jayega.” A discount! The Police Station was in the office complex of the DCP and this was happening literally under the DCP’s nose. I had to meet the DCP to manage to lodge a First Information Report FREE OF COST. As to the investigation … my brother is still waiting for any news and I have retired from the service.

The situation was bad when I joined the service. Later, it was worse rather than better.

In my cadre, for any officer working in outlying districts, a visit to the state HQ on official work used to be nightmarish. There were two government guest houses which used to cater to all of us from different services and many times, the rush was too much. One had to practically beg and plead with the concerned officials for accommodation. Other suitable accommodation was beyond the reach of our pockets and the travelling allowance. After a lot of efforts, the IPS officers pooled in certain resources and, with a bit of help from the government, managed to create an eight-room IPS Mess in the city in the early 1990s. This was a godsend and made all of us feel relieved while visiting. Long years later, when I returned to the cadre after a central deputation in 2009, I checked into the IPS Mess and had to stay there for about two months before getting official quarters. I was surprised that for almost the entire period, I was the lone occupant in the Mess. Intrigued, I asked the Mess officials how come. They said, things had changed for the better. The officers of the outlying districts preferred to stay in 5-star hotels when they visited. Change for the better indeed! The pay and travelling allowances remained a pittance. When I quizzed further as to who paid for the 5-star accommodation, there was a telling silence …

 

[to be continued further]