Putting policing on the public agenda

Policing A Democracy by R.K. Raghavan; Manohar, New Delhi, 1999; pages 312 (hardback).

THIS book presents a lucid comparative review of the management of crime in the United States of America and India. Authored by R.K. Raghavan, a senior Indian Police Service (IPS) officer who now heads the Central Bureau of Investigation, it is important for at least two reasons other than its rich empirical content.

For one, it places the ongoing debate over the practice of Indian policing in its historical and social context. More important, it offers not inconsiderable insights into how another police force operating in a democratic context has sought to address suprisingly similar problems of ethnicity, class and growing violence.

Despite the obvious differences in their historical evolution, Raghavan argues, India and the U.S. face remarkably similar policing issues. The book surveys the ways in which their very different police systems - one rooted in a centralising colonial heritage and a cash-strapped present and the other more resource-rich and structurally diffused - have coped with new problems.

In the build-up to India's independence, Raghavan shows, the major themes of contemporary policing were already evident. In August 1893, Mumbai suffered its first major communal riot, and the period between 1921 and 1947 was to see police forces engaging similar violence on a regular basis. The U.S., interestingly, saw rising levels of race and class violence in the same period, culminating in the 1917 East St. Louis massacre of blacks. Race violence was to explode again from 1965, when riots broke out in the predominantly black locality of Watts in Los Angeles.

Terrorism, too, was a theme that was to emerge in the pre-Independence period in India. Although the U.S. had encountered terrorism through history, witnessing the assassination of high political figures as India did, its experience of the phenomenon in recent years is different from that of India. Raghavan points out that the principal threat in the U.S. has come from domestic fascist groups, fringe organisations, small, highly motivated terrorist cells rather than widespread and brutal insurgencies, often with international backing.

Apart from these and other similar grand themes in policing, both police forces have had to confront allegations of gender bias, corruption, and insensitivity to local crime and community problems. As early as 1929, the Wickersham Commission in the U.S. pointed out that third-degree methods were "extensively practised". That the practice did not disappear was illustrated in 1997, when Haitian immigrant Abner Louima was tortured in custody by the New York Police Department.

Things were not significantly different in India. "It is tyrannical and dishonest," the Police Commission of 1902 said of the British Indian police, an observation the National Police Commission of 1977 said would "fully apply to the present situation". Successive surveys of the public perception of the police, Raghavan points out, have been discomfiting. Rudeness and misbehaviour by the constabulary, refusal to register complaints and demands for bribes have been shown to be endemic practices.

Police forces in the U.S. have attempted a number of initiatives to resolve these problems. Raghavan surveys efforts, for example, to recruit more women and candidates from minority groups. Although these efforts have had varying levels of success, they stand in sharp contrast to the reluctance of the Indian police forces to reach out consciously to communities traditionally excluded from policing.

As important, initiatives to expose rank and file police personnel to higher education and job-related training appear to have proliferated in the U.S., with significant results. Training programmes in the New York Police, for example, were set in place after it recorded high rates of dismissal of parking violation summons. These initiatives have obvious relevance to India. Sadly, there seem to have been few similar efforts here.

Technology has played a critical role in upgrading the responses of the U.S. police forces to crime. Since the U.S. set up its first crime laboratory in 1923, similar institutions have proliferated. The Los Angeles Police Department, for example, has over 20 police and 110 civilian specialists at its disposal. Computerisation has spread deep through the system. Although technology has been anything but free from problems, and delays in expert processing of forensic evidence are a cause for concern, the facilities are in stark contrast to those in India.

If the U.S.' efforts to reform and restructure its police forces have had varying outcomes, the fact remains that serious initiatives to address the problems have been made. Raghavan points to "two striking differences" in dealing with corruption, which are illustrative of the attitude to other issues as well.

The first is that there have been at least two public investigations of police corruption, while India has seen "no credible in-depth analysis of the problem". Second, "there is a greater transparency of public discussion of police corruption in the U.S.... Whenever the issue is debated in public forums, the tendency is toward vague generalisations."

THE lack of serious public debate on policing in India has had predictable consequences. At the grassroots level, where U.S. police officials enjoy credible union representation and well-established contractual rights, Indian police personnel face terms of service "heavily weighted against the average policeman". Little concerted pressure has been brought to bear on politicians to bring about long-debated changes in the mode of appointment and autonomy of senior police officials, including Directors-General of Police. And there has been nothing resembling a political initiative to modernise police forces and upgrade personnel skills.

Perhaps the most important point that emerges from Policing A Democracy is that the entire spectrum of issues needs participative debate: policing is too serious a business to be left to policemen and politicians alone. At one level, this means more publicly available research on questions, to answer which there is no hard data base. One question Raghavan poses, for example, is whether the changing class and caste composition of the IPS has led to changes in police attitudes to the rural poor.

Similarly, much of what passes for a critque of policing consists of polemic. Writing of terrorism in Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir, Raghavan points out that police excesses were rooted in the failure of conventional policing methods. Despite the abundance of literature, there are as yet no coherent ideas about the alternatives that need to be found.

The problems in Indian policing have little to do with lack of talent. Indian police forces have seen a plethora of exceptional officers who have evolved creative responses to new problems. Yet, these responses have rarely found institutional expression, or led to structural reform. Without informed public debate, that is unlikely to take place. Raghavan's book will hopefully attract not only professionals, but journalists, politicians and other public figures.

Some parts of Raghavan's review may seem cursory to informed observers, perhaps inevitable in a survey of this scope, and the editing on occasion leaves something to be desired. For example, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), rather than the CPI(ML), is held responsible for the recent naxalite violence in Bihar, while sections on several State-specific problems in India are somewhat dated. Despite these minor flaws, Policing A Democracy is a vital initiative in bringing real debate on policing on to the agenda.