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STRAIGHT LINE

The perception factor
A popular column of The Daily Star (Cross Talk-August 17) takes issue with the Dhaka Metropolitan Police
Commissioner's prognosis for crime situation in Dhaka city. Reportedly, the commissioner said that the growing crime rate was a matter of perception and Dhaka, comparatively speaking, was a safe city. The column concludes by saying that "both police and criminals come from people. The commissioner should know they are different not because how they see people, but because how people see them."
There is no doubt that a long string of facts have adversely affected public perception of police. The question is what the facts behind those facts are. One could ask if as a society we have really ventured to create a caring and responsive police organisation. Have we seriously pondered to know why an inherited colonial system has been expanded and strengthened to only continue to perform its repressive role and political surveillance functions at the cost of its proper role?
One has to look at the historical perspective and the objective conditions. The reality is that Bangladesh attained independence after a bloody freedom struggle: it adopted a written, liberal democratic constitution but retained the colonial administrative, police and judicial structures without recasting them to meet the changed situation. So how does one
promote liberalism with a colonial mindset, one could quip?
To illustrate, the colonial police system operated in the light of the imperial ruler's need to establish a relationship of control, coercion and surveillance over a subject population. The question is how such a system would fulfill the aspiration of an independent democratic polity
Nearer home in India, where democratic system appears to be firmly entrenched, the situation is grim. Mr. K.S. Subramanian a former officer of the Indian Police Service in Political violence and the police in India says:
"Politicisation, criminalisation, corruption, brutality and human rights violations are eating into its vitals. Public order maintenance and political intelligence collection take up most of the time of Indian police with little left for crime prevention, crime detection and service provision. The police leadership has remained a prisoner of the political party in power at all levels and has failed to contribute to organisational renewal and revitalisation, research and training, and the nurturing of professional skills.”
The above reference has been cited to highlight the systemic deficit and to understand what happens when the institution is afflicted by organisational, managerial and policy crises.
Crime management could not be seen in isolation. The reason is simply that the first purpose of the paramilitary police force is to support the state; and their primary role is a political one. The state rather than the law is supreme; and the major enemy of the police is the political subversive rather than the ordinary criminal.
The organisational objective is important because in the colonial
model the policemen are accountable to their superiors, rather than public opinion or the law. Their duties are tabulated for them, and there is little or no room for discretion — clearly, such a police force would dictate a very different relationship between police and society. The distinction between society and state and between state and government gets blurred.
We have to remember that a police organisation which is controlled is a source of great power to its controllers. Therefore, do we see any societal
effort to monitor police power carefully and harness it for the good of all? It needs to be remembered that to place police and their power under the sole direction of executive government is to give that arm of government power to enforce its will on society and overrule opposition.
Is it likely that our leaders who came to occupy positions of power after the departure of the British and Pakistanis were enamoured by the administrative and police system left behind by the colonial powers and enjoyed exercising power and authority, oblivious of their own demand of yesteryears for far-reaching administrative reforms?
Do we witness the public caught in an increasingly norm-free, unpredictable and unjust environment? Who is responsible for transforming policing from the professional imposition of a coherent moral consensus on society into unethical activities?
While the prevalent wisdom of a section of our society to lay all the blame at the door of the politicians is untenable, it is also not in broader public interest to make sweeping observations like "people are not safe even in their bedrooms, rape is common, murders are frequent, mugging is routine like a traffic jam," without the benefit of appropriate analysis and statistics and cognisance of the broader perspective. It is time for substantive police reforms to plug the systemic holes, and control the deviants and where necessary to weed out the bad hats.
The writer is a columnist of The Daily Star.