"The policing will automatically improve if crimes are thoroughly investigated, criminals are arrested, prosecuted, and complaints are efficiently handled"
Police Matters
The motivation behind writing this article is to put a correct perspective of Police and policing issues, and not to criticise anything but only to improve. During my field posting as District DCP in Delhi, I could understand all these things directly and this article is actually a mix of experiential learning and readings which I could do before and after that. When our intellectuals perceive and explain the growth rate of economy etc, they are focused only on fiscal and monetary measures as the absolute measures to nudge and direct the growth dynamics. Unfortunately, policing has not been seen as an integral part of growth governance and good governance. The most inalienable rights of mankind being life, liberty, and property, are very deeply connected and impacted by Police and policing. The good policing is a precondition of good governance and then the good growth edifice. The ease of living or happiness index of citizens do factor the nuances of good policing. The challenges are tremendous, and we must leave our biases and presumptions to understand the correct picture.
The criminal justice system of contemporary India is hinging on the laws which have been enacted long back while the ground situations have change drastically creating wide mismatch. The crime- controlled society, I am deliberately avoiding the term crime free society which is an utopia, can be possible when we have taken the holistic eco system of criminal justice wherein police functions. The delivery of justice is always mirage in the criminal matters until and unless criminals are brought to justice and crimes are controlled. So, my topic of discussion is to cover these two dimensions. How to ensure that criminals are punished within appropriate legal framework so that they fear to become recidivists. The crime control and management in police stations need to be studied in view of changed scenarios due to advent of latest technologies and latest vulnerabilities of society. The assurance of Police leaders that everything is alright, is more driven by their positional constraints than the structured analysis of situations. So, a well-studied approach by intellectuals should be taken up for articulating at the right forums to get better remedies in time bound ways to avoid the embarrassments to the Police leaders. The assurances may be simply posturing with crafted replies , supported by engineered statistics .
What are the bitter realities? If we analyse the crime happening – situation load, law and order management load, Investigation load vis a vis crime mapping and statistics, we are obviously wrong and unfair if we justify the resource eco system which our Police organisations do have. I fully agree that the economic capabilities of state must be kept in to mind before expecting resource allocation for policing. However, there are some inherent problems within the police- systems with regard to allocation of resources and their optimum management or utilisations which adversely impact the deliverables and policing outcomes. Better use of affordable technologies and resources too can be game changers. For example, petty investigations can be easily handled by AI enabled ecosystem, saving lot of manual workloads, outsourcing of certain policing tasks can relieve lot of manpower and then surrendering some inefficient manpower for higher quality manpower with befitting job roles, can do a lot more positive changes. We are in an age where the dynamics of crimes has taken so many turns and we must come outside from our traditional mindsets or mental blockades to handle them efficiently. For example, processing of summons and warrants need to be handled using IT enabled technologies. It is very strange that lot of warrants etc do remain unserved because of the address errors or changes by the accused. Very strange. We may take a drive to connect all these issues with AADHAR enabled eco system which in turn being connected with banks etc, can give us backend support to nab such offenders who enjoy anonymity by locating at some other places. The investigation of cases can be made easier by developing better templates driven by AI to increase the quality and ease out quantity overload on IOs.
If you see on any working day, almost all the field staff till the level of SHO, are in courts, deposing this or that. I am not saying that this is an unproductive work but this eco system of work can be very well substituted by virtual depositions by police officers in courts in structured ways. Thanks to the zoom culture due to pandemic. This will save lot of precious time of police officers and will improve their day-to-day work in doing policing. Investigation can be made easier using better technologies, not only in nabbing criminals but preparing better case files and chargesheets for the prosecution of criminals with the use of so many IT tools. We have extremely poor rate of convictions because criminals hire better legal minds or Investigators do a poor job due to so many constraints. The use of Artificial intelligence in assessing the image of police in fields should be another good effort to understand complaints and their truthfulness. The voluminous increase in PCR calls and complaints need to be interpreted by AI to give a quick knowledge and remedial measures to the police leaders at all levels. Another improvement in policing is allocating job roles according to efficiency profiles of personnel. Again, this process needs better hand-holdings and incubations to collaborate with all stakeholders in the system. The general perception of police officers from bottom up should be the sense of fairness in the work allocations and work culture to avoid the disconnects. Unfortunately, the work culture in police is still command driven, lacking lot of psychological ingredients of bottom-up suggestions to improve the efficiencies. The outcome of policing should be monitored closely with IT enabled dashboards at critical levels in real time so that data- mischiefs be better escaped. The policing will automatically improve if crimes are thoroughly investigated, criminals are arrested and prosecuted, and complaints are efficiently handled. I think that all these things can be done easily if these reforms are studied by third party institutions being objective and open minded, of course, taking critical inputs from all police ranks and stake holders.
-MN Tiwari
The author is a senior IPS officer in Delhi
(Email:- mntiwari66@gmail.com)
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