Indian Police Force - Part I

The source of this particular blog is a statement I heard today. I was in a Pune multiplex, which is usually the sole source of entertainment for us unattached guys on the weekends. While moving up the stairs, I heard a red Ferrari T shirt telling a green checked shirt that "Sab policewaale saale chor hote hai!". All policemen are thieves! The statement got me thinking. I mean, first the complex antithesis of words and then the not so subtle irony. But, the thing that struck me most was the fact that if someone made this statement in a public medium like a newspaper, very few people will come forward and deny it!

The cops have indeed garnered a bad name for themselves! And it doesn't help them that the newspapers keep on reporting stories of "accidental" deaths in custody and other gruesome stories, some even involving rapes! But even that is not the worst of it! These stories cannot be considered as a representation of the entire police force. But what I cant put off is the fact that anyone who has had any interaction with the police, rarely has anything good to say about it! I really don't know anybody, who wasn't made to offer a little gift during the police check procedure while getting the passport. And have you ever tried to get a traffic hawaldar to give you a challan? It is easier to make a politician keep his promise!

Has your house ever been robbed? How many times have you heard after the robbery that it is no use to get the police? Furthermore, how many times have you been told that the police know that you were going to be robbed and that they will receive their cut in the loot? This is just hearsay, but I am not writing this for showing that the police are corrupt, but to show the perception that the public have of the police. Do we believe that the police force is no longer a force that protects and preserves, but just an interface between the public and the more uncertain elements of the public?

If we consider the movies that are being made at a certain time to be the mirror of the social mood of that time, then the police have really lost some serious stock with the people. During the 70's, the movies usually showed the police as the good guys, or at least, with the good guys. There was an odd double agent kind of police officer here and there, but usually the police officer was an educated, intelligent and a principled person. The trend slowly started to die down during the 80's, and during the 90's, the theme was a good police officer here and there, but that's about it. In this decade, however, except for the movies eulogizing Mumbai police, the police officer is almost always corrupt and completely uninterested in his police duties!

So, over the years, the police have grown ineffective and corrupt, according to the Hindi film industry. But, if they are ineffective, are they solely to blame for it? Has not the Indian society itself embraced corruption over the last few decades? Has not the bureaucracy failed to provide effective solutions for the problems of the public? So, if every arm of the government is corrupt, why single out the police force? Because, unfortunately for the police, of all the arms of the government, they are the most visible! And more unfortunately, the results of their work are even more visible!

So, what can be done to improve the efficiency of the police force? What can be done is....