Demonising the police will be fatal
Bangladesh's police culture has suffered devastating blows and contemporary police culture is far away from the ideal one. In particular, the recent misdeeds of police indulged in fearsome frequency, are unfortunately not leaving any responsible citizen in any doubt about the ugly shape Bangladesh's police culture has willy-nilly acquired. The country witnesses the policeman misusing his position and thus violating the trust of the public. This cannot be allowed to continue because the police organisation needs to be saved from sinking beyond retrieval. There is an imperative to make our police jettison the contemporary police culture and adopt the desired measures.
The historical perspective and the continuity
Our policing methods have developed over time from very rough and ready origins. The first purpose of our police force is to support the State and thus the primary role is a political one. The State, rather than the law, is supreme and the major enemy of the police is the so-called political subversive rather than the ordinary criminal. Our police have been more accountable to the superior officers than the public opinion or the law. Duties are tabulated and there is little or no room for discretion. Such traditions or practices would dictate a very different relationship between police and society.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. The role of police in our country have made them appear as an agency more to implement and enforce the objectives of the government in power and to help the affluent sections of the society. The police is not looked as an independent and impartial agency for encouragement of law and order. Many policemen suffer from egocentricity and self-opinionated ideas and often act contrary to public interests and expectations. A good many policemen feel that people should acknowledge their authority with abject submission and remain ever-ready to oblige them in every possible way.
Somehow policemen in our parlance feel that the enrolment in police force automatically gives them the right to enjoy many rights and privileges. Since police are armed with coercive authority, the policemen get the idea that people must fear them and oblige. They exercise discretion by becoming indiscriminate all too often.
Societal expectations and police role
The duty of police a democratic polity is not only to enforce the law but also to observe it. If this cannot be ensured then the law in practice is likely to be disregarded. In a democracy our police have to function under two basic principles, namely, (i) consent and balance and (ii) independence and accountability. This would mean efforts to secure the consent of the community and to strike a balance between different objectives of the role of police in society as well as maintaining independence in functioning but always remaining accountable to the law of the land and parliamentary institutions. Undoubtedly, this is a complex and difficult job. The difficulty lies in reconciling the dilemmas of preserving liberty and human rights of the individual on one hand and enforcing laws which aim at preservation of society from criminal depredations on the other. The police has to function in a battlefield of tension between the state and the individual. So the task is to ensure that the police use their force and authority with utmost restraint and only in unavoidable circumstances.
Political behaviour and aberrations
Our politicians betray a pathetic lack of appreciation of the imperative that the foundation of a civilised society depends upon the effective and impartial working of some corrective institutions, prominent among which is the public service. They appear to be perilously oblivious to the reality that the regulatory outfit of police must be demonstrably impartial to ensure public confidence in the governance ability of the ruling class. The ruling parties in their misplaced exuberance forget that the police was the dominant visible symbol of repressive imperial alien power and that de-colonisation requires large-scale behavioural and attitudinal changes of the political masters and the public servants belonging to this vital organ of the state. Thus while admonitions from the pulpit come in plenty for rational behaviour on the part of enforcement officials, in reality, unhealthy pressures are regularly exerted to carry out the wishes of the ruling coterie in the most expeditious manner. It is the continuance of such regressive mentality that has brought us to the present lamentable scenario wherein the police outfit has been described as a lackey of the political government. Nothing could be more sad and frustrating than that.
The administrative position and imperatives
If we want to get out of the aforementioned undesirable situation, we have to take quick action to repair our badly bruised democratic credentials. First of all, the police needs to be insulated from political executive and other interferences in promotions, postings and security of tenure. The people must not get an impression that the investigation agencies are very efficient while taking the required action against those not in power and that as against those in power, their edge is blunted. If police act impartially, credibility would be restored to the investigative authorities. This is very important because as long as the impression persists that a policeman is not an unbiased friend of people, the concept of an orderly society would not be achieved.
Since our police system conceived and grew in a colonial ecology and is now planted in a developmental, democratic and prismatic environment where a new ruling class is passing through numerous stresses and strains, it becomes difficult for the police to obtain and secure a close cooperation of the people and thereby discharge its functions and fulfill its role efficaciously. There is, therefore, a need to appreciate the role perception of the police system in our changing environment so that we can understand and identify the challenges emanating from the systemic stresses and strains and be able to formulate viable responses.
Our police is the most significant sub-system of the criminal justice system. It is also a limb of the executive system and the judiciary which takes its energy from the legislative system. Our constitutional value depicts general spirit of service of weaker sections, women and children, serving the people and functioning as per rule of law and due process of law. Therefore, if due to large-scale politicisation the police start acting at the behest of extralegal persons which is a genuine suspicion, then mostly they will round up innocent persons and permit the guilty to escape.
The police continue to be the principal investigating agency for the state under the criminal procedure code in addition to being the primary outfit responsible for prevention of crime. They should, therefore, strive hard for upholding the constitutional objective of protection of an individual's dignity and civic rights. Since justice is the ensuring of civil liberties it is only proper that the police truly become its protector and defender. A politicised police force will not be able to ensure a sense of security in the community and will not succeed in enlisting the cooperation and participation of people in crime prevention programmes. Similarly, the political appointees may not appreciate that their jobs is not to encroach upon the rights and liberty of the individual and the premonition is that they may look upon themselves as mere pawns in the hands of governing elite. They cannot be expected to be accountable to the real sovereign, the people. Such policemen will inevitably compromise the dignity of the individual citizen. In such a scenario, democracy will gather deficits at our peril.
The suffering of the members of public
The governance scenario will not register positive improvements if the principal regulatory outfit shows signs of decadence. Many of us including the political masters do not realise that the police as an agency of the state is expected to be the relief-provider. So if appropriately motivated and competent personnel do not man the organisation, who is going to provide the much-needed relief to the common folks? Coming to the unpalatable specifics of getting an appointment in police ranks by greasing the palms of the influential, one may say with a degree of certitude that appointees from such process mostly turn into bitter individuals from the very start.
Only the affected and the insiders know the extent of financial hardship experienced by the ordinary people in such dubious exercise.
So when bitter individuals occupy positions of coercive power, the result cannot be wholesome. The minds and motivations of such individuals remain preoccupied with the compulsions of recouping their initial investment at the earliest. Quite naturally, the lure of the lucre takes its toll. The imperatives of acting neutrally and with sympathy and compassion recede into the background. No wonder therefore that many of our police stations are not sympathetic listening posts from where the people can expect service delivery.
The important point to note is that most people visit police stations or come into contact with the police only when under stress and strain. It is in these circumstances that every victim expects a sympathetic and understanding response. The expected support and sympathy are not there because the disgruntled and bitter appointees cannot appreciate the aforementioned psycho-social dimension. Therefore, if the police has to provide service it has to induct capable and psychologically appropriately disposed individuals.
Lack of sensitisation
Our politicians have failed to sensitise our policemen in correctly understanding the rising expectations and aspirations of the people which result from the enunciation of national goals in the political sphere. Our policemen are not made to understand that any gap between the promise of constitutional ideal and the reality leads to strains and tensions which are mobilised for the 'politics of agitation'. There is still not adequate appreciation that the resultant politicisation of the masses and the development among them of a greater awareness of their rights and methods of achievement intensify the ferment and lead to confrontations with authority. Thus our policemen often come into conflict with the forces generated by the political system which they are intended not only to serve but also preserve. This delicacy and complexity is not adequately understood and impressed upon.
The net result of such a scenario is that the police is cast into a rigid adversarial relationship. Under such circumstances, the hallowed talks of endearing the police to the community and the lofty ideas of community policing sound hollow. In any venture of promotional efforts the real stakeholders are conspicuously absent. The outcome remains less than desirable.
Ground reality and remedy
Bangladesh police suffers from a colonial past and a legacy of coercion. In colonial times, the police was an agent of imperial brutality and earned an image of being anti-people. However, in our democratic polity, police is the first servant of the people; it is not to be used as it used to be, that is to perpetuate particular party's rule. To effectively prevent misuse of police force, the infiltration of political element into the organisation rendering the outfit incapable of providing impartial and efficient service must stop. This is of paramount importance because large number of incidences of torture in various forms and harassment of political opponents reportedly take place at the behest of the government in power.
Legal aid, sincere in nature, must come along almost the time a member of the weaker section of the society is arrested. Such a step will reduce the possibility of wrongful confinement, false incrimination in offences and the pangs of torture and the possible physical deformity, if not death in police custody. In this connection reference may be drawn to the observation of the Indian Supreme Court in 1986 when it said that the failure of a criminal court to provide legal aid to a person who cannot engage a lawyer to defend himself at a criminal trial will entitle him to acquittal.
Another preventive measure would be aggressive investigative journalism to expose the gross misuse of power by police. This will, hopefully, substantially deter the wayward lawmen.
Our policemen and proportion of wrong-doers
One may not know that the life style of the overwhelming majority of our policemen are no different from the ordinary Bangladeshis. Let any prudent man enter the Rajarbag Police Lines and see for himself what the policemen eat, where do they live and what is their take-home pay. Let him also find out the average working hours of a policeman. It is strongly likely that he will mostly find ungrudging sons of the peasants of Bangladesh ever ready to the call of duty. Like ordinary Bangladeshis they have reconciled to their fate and quietly wait for a better tomorrow. Like their countrymen they display infinite patience. The acts of a few black sheep must not be allowed to smear the virtues of toiling policemen. The bad hats must be dealt with an iron hand at the very first instance of criminality. The unholy alliance between criminal policemen and corrupt politicians must be broken and the performance of both should be under constant scrutiny. The recruitment process of subordinate police functionaries have to be sanitised to prevent the entry of undesirable elements and drastic disciplinary actions relating to delinquent police officers must not be interfered with. These are not tall orders. We need them to bring sanity in our governance scenario.
Finally, let all concerned remember that the police are vested with the authority to use legitimate force against the citizens and this mandate to use force to curb violence raises the key issue that the police themselves should not indulge in unnecessary violence or excessive use of force. The task before the supervisors should be to ensure that the police use force and authority with restraint and only in unavoidable circumstances. While the ultimate accountability of the police is to the people, the police must respect the law of the land. They are not licenced to become law-breakers themselves. Let the most visible symbol of government authority be a helping arm for the public instead of being a coercive arm of the state.