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| NEWS > 15 April 2007 |
Other related articles:
UK: Policeman sacked after sex
A police officer who escaped jail after having sex with a vulnerable woman while supposedly checking on her welfare has been sacked.
Detective Constable John Richmond, 53, visited the 45-year-old at her north London flat a day after she discharged herself from hospital following a drug overdose.
He was dismissed following an internal police misconduct hearing, a spokeswoman for the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) said. Richmond was given a nine-month sentence, suspended for one year, for misconduct in public office at London's Southwark Crown Court earlier thi... Read more
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Daily News & Analysis - Mumbai
15 April 2007
This article appeared in the above title/site.
To view it in its entirity click this link.
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Opinion: How to police the pol
Anil Dharker
As I write this on Saturday morning, the newspapers are full of the Alistair Pereira judgement. ‘Sentenced to six months for killing seven people’ tells its own story, the sub-text of which is the judge’s scathing criticism of the police investigation. He has called it ‘shoddy’, condemned the police team’s ‘casual approach’ and gone so far as to say that the officers in charge do not know how to ‘investigate the matter when such accidents take place’.
Sharing front page with this report is a seemingly unconnected issue, except that it’s also about the police: the inquiry ordered into corruption charges against Maharashtra’s top most police official, its DG of Police.
Are these two stories really unconnected? There is no direct connection, and in any case, the probe against the DG may in the end find nothing against him. But there is a connection in a general sense, which is that none of us is now surprised by news of either police incompetence or police corruption. And, in fact, we see them as complementary, one contributing to the other. So when the judge says that the Pereira investigation was botched up, that he was convicting the defendant only because of strong circumstantial evidence, we immediately begin to ask if the messed up police work was really because of inefficiency, or because someone in the investigation team stood to gain from the bungling. No one has produced evidence to that effect, but my point is this: The reputation of the police in this country is at such a low point that we are all ready to believe the very worst of the department.
Let’s take the Alistair Pereira case. If there is anything unusual about it, it’s only in the very high number of fatalities. Otherwise it’s a routine case: a car driven at high speed in the middle of the night by an inebriated driver loses control and crashes. If it’s as routine as it seems to be, why should the judge feel constrained to say that the police had no idea how to investigate the case? And if the police have no idea about how to investigate a routine accident, do they have any clue about investigating anything at all? That’s the question we all need to ask and yet it’s a question no one ever asks. Neither the media, nor the law-makers and never the cops themselves.
Take a look at the statements made by senior police officials in the country when they take over the top jobs in the department. Each one will promise to do this or that major overhaul during his tenure, but no one will ever speak of conducting courses, of imparting training, of taking quick yet calculated steps to make sure that police efficiency improves, so that the cop on the beat and the cop in the chowki know what to do, at least in routine cases.
I used to think that this strange gap had to do with a kind of caste system; there was the upper caste of IPS officers, smart, educated and polished, at ease in every section of sophisticated society, and there, at the bottom of the heap, were the lower castes, the direct recruit, the policeman who has either the hot, sweaty and boring job of standing around on duty doing nothing, or the deadening and de-sensitising job of having to deal with social misfits and criminal elements. And the upper castes are happy to go their own way, interacting with the lower castes only when absolutely necessary, otherwise leaving them to their own devices.
But I am now beginning to wonder if there is yet another element in this caste system which has the unique advantage of keeping both the castes, happy. And that is to perpetuate police unpreparedness and lack of training, because when you have an untrained force, you can always blame bad investigations on incompetence rather than something worse. To state the obvious: When there is money in it for everyone in messing up an investigation and no money at all for anyone in doing a first class job, which way do you think the cookie will crumble?
I hope I am wrong. I hope that even as I write this, senior policemen have formulated plans to set things right and it’s only a matter of time before judges will have no strictures to pass about the police.
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