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Upgrading cops' status
A report in a daily newspaper informs us that the government has upgraded the post of police
inspector to class one from class two, and those of sergeant and sub-inspector to class two from class three. According to one considered view, this up-gradation will have very significant impact on the morale of policemen and thus on the overall law and order administration. One has to wait to see the outcome. There is, however, no denying that the present government has taken a laudable step by fulfilling a long-felt demand of mainstream policing.
The cynical observer would say that cops’ status has been upgraded in the eyes of the government but their real status in the society would depend on their conduct and performance vis-a-vis the members of public. In other words, the crux of the matter is whether the cops would serve the establishment’s interest without venturing to check its legal standing and if they would work as true public servants maintained by public money.
Answers to the above queries would not be easy to come by, as policing in this part of the world, for reasons well-known, is yet to be a respectable profession. That, however, has not prevented the guardians from waxing eloquent on the virtues of an impartial professional police organisation. The reality is that while their concern is admirable, remedial actions on ground have been less than adequate.
Those wishing to take a deeper look into the status question may find that the public do not trust the police although they have to depend on them. Even if the public starts trusting the police, the law does not. This puts the police in a unique predicament. The mistrust between police and the public is a historical creation. Laws which govern the police were created to raise the trust of the people in British Empire so that the colonial occupation could continue forever.
When the police were organised, they were given a low status, a low salary, but more fetters so that they could not really serve the people but only the masters who were ruling the people. This background has to be
understood clearly while studying the evolution of police in our country. There is a consensus that the police has been misused and abused, leading to the decline in the rule of law and thereby increasing distrust in police performance. This factor is directly related to the status question.
The laws of crime, evidence and procedure dating back to midnineteenth century and designed to serve the colonial interests of an imperial power still govern the day-to-day functioning of our police force. The question is: can a colonialist police meet the needs of a free society in a flux? It would not be an exaggeration to say that most efforts at reform have met with increasing resistance from the entrenched privileged classes in politics and the so-called civil service. Our society looks at and treats a policeman with revulsion and contempt, little realising that there is no such thing as ’’scientific investigation" and "clean interrogation" under a legal system where the guardians of
law are not even recognised as such.
The Criminal Procedure Code and the Evidence Act look upon police officers with distrust, which lowers their morale, reduces their efficiency and affects their character. The considered view is that the public cannot be expected to trust the police when the law of the land does not do so. This distrust of the police is not only widely known but also manifests itself every day in courts throughout the country. It is thus not unusual to see police officers resorting to padding of evidence and other dubious methods partly because what they do and what they say are invariably looked upon with suspicions. The question is how can the police func-
tion if they are not trusted?
In our country the law maintains that statement of witness recorded by the police need not be signed by them. Confessions made before a police officer are not admissible in evidence. Even when the fact of recovery of a crime weapon becomes admissible, any self-incriminating statement of the accused will render it suspect before the court and a conviction can be sustained only on independent evidence of witnesses. For example, if the police officer is the only witness in a crime like murder, rape or robbery, a conviction cannot be sustained merely on his evidence.
The increasing violence, the changing patterns of crime, more sophistication of weapons used in crime and the general atmosphere of insecurity demand a review of the provisions of law to empower the police for effectively dealing with lawless activities. We have to (a) free the police from the clutches of extraneous forces (b) make the police accountable to people and law (c) improve police credibility by reposing more trust in his depositions, at least at the assistant superintendent level (d) raise his status to make him trustworthy in the eyes of the citizen (e) regulate police behaviour through internal controls and external supervision through an independent agency.
The above steps may appear unusual for transforming an organisation abruptly from being unreliable to being virtuous. But there is no alternative left to us. The way character, ethics and morals are being lowered; the manner in which educated people flout the law; the helpless way in which the state is witnessing the ordeal of the citizens compel us to do something drastic. When trust is reposed in police, there will be proper response also to honour the trust. There should be no premonition that the situation will not improve. It will once substantive police reforms are started. In such a scenario, the real status of the police would desirably and appropriately be stable. The writer is a columnist of The Daily Star.