The greatest problem of policing in India today is that the police are mostly ineffective. They are ineffective on the streets, in preventing petty or grave crimes, and in defending the rights of the weak or vulnerable. But the most glaring shortfall of the police is that they seldom punish their own. If they could do at least that much, then the public might begin to trust them again. Though the Indian public might want to cooperate with or respect the police, unfortunately there is currently no basis for them to do so.
The Indian public’s experience of policing today is marked by illegal arrests and detention, torture, excessive use of force, and corruption. This is endemic to the Indian police and has become public knowledge, with methods and patterns of misconduct and illegality carefully documented by civil society and researchers. The Indian State no longer actively denies these practices, but it hasn’t done much to address them either.
Over a decade ago, the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) began collating information on cases of human rights violations attributed to the police. Human rights violations were defined as disappearance of persons, illegal detentions, fake encounters, extortion, torture and rape. This was an encouraging step forward towards fighting impunity. However, the last NCRB report records a mere 94 instances of human rights violations by the police. Of these, 12 were promptly deemed to be false by the police department after a preliminary inquiry. There is no publicly known procedure of how complaints are deemed to be false—this lies at the discretion of the police department. The investigations led to filing of chargesheets (i.e., official accusations) against only 34 of these complaints. But what is more disturbing is that not a single one of these resulted in a conviction.
