In a recent article in an American newspaper, the doyen among police scholars, Prof. David Bayley, expressed his anguish over what he considered to be a crisis in U.S. law enforcement. In his view this was caused mainly by three factors: race, police training and guns. There was an undeniable need for reform, but the prospects for this happening were bleak because of a multitude of factors, including the size of police forces, lack of political and community support.
The Indian police is exactly in the same situation. People are dissatisfied with the quality of service they are getting from the grass roots. They are frustrated with the same old alibi trotted out by the police: political interference.
Do rudimentary courtesy to the public at a police station, registration of an FIR when a complaint is received, and acting against harassment of women in public spaces all need political direction?
Not at all. The system therefore needs drastic restructuring, beyond cosmetics, in order to make policing more professional and more acceptable to the common man. Look at what other professions have done.
How to professionalise
Those propounding evidence-based policing, a movement launched more than a decade ago both in the U.S and the U.K., often refer to success in the area of health care to strengthen the case for experiment-based law enforcement.
Their plea is unexceptionable, especially in India, where the popular image of the police is not flattering. This is despite some remarkable work done by policemen at the cutting edge level. Notwithstanding some token efforts initiated by a few dynamic IPS officers in the larger cities, there is an overall reluctance to experiment with measures that could transform the police from a traditional outfit into a sleek modern force that is constantly looking for ways to upgrade delivery of its service.
A recent international conference organised by the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University was the occasion for some serious brainstorming on the issue of how to infuse some fresh thinking into the twin problems of maintaining public order and combating conventional crime.
In effect, the task was how to make the police shed their slumber and arbitrariness in reacting to field developments and make them acquire a fresh mindset to cope with the dire needs of a society under attack.
On the face of it, the subject may appear cliched. In reality, however, the task of policing the community has become far too complex to permit the smug feeling that throwing increased manpower and use of new technology in themselves would be enough to steady a deteriorating situation. If this were so, policing all over the world would be in clover.
The fact is, even in countries that have a strong legacy of clinical public administration, there is increasing disenchantment with the way the police handle major crises. This again leads us to only one question: can things improve with a greater scientific approach, and not necessarily the use of gadgets, to day-to-day police operations?
Simply put, policing has acquired many new connotations and a certain immediacy which cannot brook any delay. Terrorism and cyber attacks in particular are heightening the levels of fear of the community. How well have the police responded to this serious challenge to stability?
Stop muddling along
The basic truth is that policing has become far too routine and mechanical at a time when there is need for a drastically different response to events. Reactive policing was adequate to a community as long as it had its fundamentals unshaken.
We are now living in tumultuous times, where violent crime grips major cities across the globe. How else would you account for the increasing number of homicides in an otherwise placid State such as Tamil Nadu?
Here, anyone speaking against a rival political faction or a rival caste group now faces imminent threat. This in a region where there was until recently a fear of the law and an esteem for the police’s capacity to swoop on the offenders in quick time. Now, hired goons rule the day, and the police are afraid of them.
Styled as a conference on evidence-based policing (EBP), the gathering of academics and active police leaders at Cambridge endorsed the imperative to fine-tune traditional styles, which placed an emphasis solely on the mechanical use of police resources rather than an intelligent application of available skills.
Known as the father of EBP, Prof. Lawrence Sherman, the leading light of the Institute of Criminology, is a relentless crusader, who holds that mindless policing to appease the polity is wasteful and misdirected. He and his fellow scholars are pushing for rigorous experiments on the field and appraising their findings against the realities of the daily fight against crime. In their view, a controlled experiment will throw up any number of facts that could help sharpen police professionalism. They draw from the remarkable progress that medical science has made in recent decades by encouraging bold experiments.
Prediction and prevention
There are two areas in which EBP could deliver. These are prediction and prevention. The strategy is one of identifying ‘hot spots’ of crime and spotting problematic individuals in a community.
The former task requires an analysis of events which are either crimes by themselves or border on crimes defined by law. There are certain geographic areas in each police jurisdiction which report more incidents than others.EBP goes beyond statistics and pinpoints the time and opportunities presented to a potential offender.
As the seminal essay ‘Broken Windows’ carried by the Atlantic magazine several years ago pointed out, where there is public apathy and civic neglect, the prospects of crime are high.
Fixing a street light that is not burning for several days, for instance, is an action that could contain crime. EBP studies phenomena such as these and highlights findings that are germane to crime prevention.
Similarly, monitoring patterns of behaviour of a class of individuals who had come to the adverse notice of law enforcement is a logical way to predict whether they will again lapse into crime. Despite the unfairness in targeting those who had indulged in anti-social behaviour in the past and keeping a tab on their day-to-day activities, there is an expected benefit of being able to predict future criminal behaviour.
It is not as if every convict will go back to crime once set free. Several studies have strengthened the belief that recidivism is not uncommon, and that many future crimes can be foiled by pinpointing who, more than others, could be expected to offend once more. There is a certain inexactitude in this approach that one should learn to live with.
These are the fundamentals to EBP, a discipline that is gaining credibility by the day. To dismiss it as pure academic hogwash would be irrational and blind to a fast deteriorating scene marked by high crime. Exposing our police officers to this concept would make them more professional, something that would certainly enhance the Indian police’s image, which is currently dismal.
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.