Stained Khaki: The roots and aggravations of police brutality
The lockdown has worsened systematic failures in the Indian police, rooting from implicit biases and leading to more violence. Sadaf Vidha takes stock of the American movement against police brutality to frame against the glaring issues back home in India.
What happens to the psychology of the police when on the job? Why is violence so easily the answer to any non-conformity by the citizens?
The COVID-19 lockdown has highlighted many facets of human behaviour, including facets that many of us would have never wanted to see. We all know that we live in an unequal world, yet, the lockdown has shown us exactly how unequal. Watching protestors rise up in protest after the death of George Floyd in the USA, it’s evident that we share a common experience of police brutality in India—albeit, the national response here has been drastically different.
Be it last year’s rampant police abuse on students protesting the CAA (particularly in educational institutions like Jamia and JNU), or police upending carts of vegetable sellers during the lockdown, India has seen a worrying spike in police brutality in recent months. This is, clearly, not a new phenomenon. But the average citizen has been let down by the Supreme Court in their response to such brutality.
The Supreme Court has suggested many reforms over the course of the years, but these reforms aren’t always seen in practice. And, especially after Judge Bobde took his seat as the CJI, statements like “first stop the violence, then we will hear the plea” and “what can we do if there are migrants on the road” have left the average citizen rather dumbfounded. If the state decides to unleash violence on the citizen, or not meet the citizen’s basic needs, the doors of justice are effectively closed. In recent weeks, we have seen the state using the police to arrests activists like Safoora Zargar, as well as two ‘pinjra tod’ activists, even as gun-wielding miscreants—sloganeering the violent “goli maaro saalo ko” chant—roam without any accountability.
Many Indian experts have written about the issues plaguing the police force, which lead to some of the problems in the public-police relationship. Starting from the Police Act itself, we can see that the policy drafting does not follow the idea of a “people friendly” police. There is an unwritten policy to have as few “recorded” crimes as possible and thus, the average policeman will not easily write an FIR.
The brutality of the police is meted out towards those most oppressed in the society. In this, it follows the same pattern of discrimination that the larger society follows. In India, we see disproportionate police brutality towards the poor, the migrants, the caste minorities, women and the tribal population.
Other issues that plague the system including shortage of manpower in the force, and many police-workers being redirected instead to protect VIPs despite the shortfall. There are bad working conditions for the constables who form 85% of the force, long hours, few leave-days, a skewed gender ratio, poor training and poor standards.
There is also the concern of political meddling into the police, which again is a loophole coming from the Police Act itself. In 2013, the Justice Verma committee ensured that cognizance was taken of the fact that police do not handle gender-based crimes with sensitivity. However, little has changed since then. As of May 2020, a woman doctor on her way back from work at a COVID hospital was asked by a police officer—on duty to ensure the lockdown in Telangana—“with whom are you going to sleep with?”
So, let’s ask again: why has violence or hostility from those in police uniform so often been the answer? If we look at the iconic Stanford Prison experiment of 1975, we understand how certain officers could act unlike themselves and use cruelty against another person, because of their role definition. “Just doing my job” allows for the person to act with little to no empathy for the person they are afflicting violence upon. The Stanford Prison Experiment has lately been criticised for methodological issues, but it has had some of its intended effect, making people and policy makers in the US think about the powers of the uniform. The head researcher of this experiment, Philip Zombardo, was commissioned to look into the war crimes of US soldiers in Iraq, giving his concept of the psychology of evil and how to prevent it.
This would be a complete answer in itself if the problem was random violence from the police towards the citizens. It is not. The brutality of the police is meted out towards those most oppressed in the society. In this, it follows the same pattern of discrimination that the larger society follows. For the US, the discrimination is reserved disproportionately for black people, other people of colour, women, and trans people. In India, we see disproportionate police brutality towards the poor, the migrants, the caste minorities, women and the tribal population. In a bizarre incident, a lawyer in Madhya Pradesh was beaten brutally and told later, with an apology, “We thought you had a beard, so you were a Muslim”.
It is not so bizarre when we turn to the 2019 report on the status of policing in India, suggesting rampant bias of the Indian police. 50% of the police officers surveyed feel Muslims commit more crimes. When they have to make split second decisions in the absence of proper training, with violence as the only method available, the decision was made on the bases of these implicit biases that they learned growing up and were later reinforced at various stages in their lives. It is no wonder, then, that less than 25% of Indians surveyed in the 2018 policing report had trust in the police.
This glaring “image issue” of the police needs to be fixed. It is not a surprise that both the US and India have produced movies and shows glorifying the police, with most recent trends including films like Dabangg, Singham, or the American comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine. The idea behind these endeavours is for the average citizen to understand the inner world and motivations of the police officer, to see them as less hostile. However, such a band-aid solution will hardly work when the police have deep held prejudices against the very citizens that are supposed to be in awe of them.
However, the police are just a symptom of a larger problem. The idea of “broken windows” policing is that you need to fix the more visible signs of crime like graffiti and vandalism, and this will give a sense of law and order, which will discourage further crime from happening. This theory uniformly places the burden of the crime on the poor or marginalised, because often, them engaging in minor crimes is an expression of their abject situation, with desperate needs and hardly any outlets to release their frustration. The theory does not think of providing the poor and oppressed with their basic needs as a solution at all. Experiments with housing, basic income, legalising drug use and providing rehabilitation have shown a decrease in crime over time.
We need to look at our definition of crime itself. More often than not, it is because of unmet basic needs. Gender based crimes are an expression of societal prejudices that each child grows up surrounded with. As we know very well with cases like Jessica Lal and Brock Turner, some people (especially the privileged) will escape the effects of this conditioning more easily than others.
So, if the police cannot provide needs that might stop the crime or undo societal conditioning that might prevent crime, what exactly is their job? By this very gap then, the job of the police remains to stop the outbursts against these inequalities, whenever they arise. To stop the expression of the problem from happening. Because if the problem is expressed, it might need to be solved.
This is the reason why, as figures show, crime has not gone down with increase in the numbers of police or changes in reforms, both in India and in the US. as Alex Vitale, in his 2017 book, End of Policing states:
It is largely a liberal fantasy that the police exist to protect us from the bad guys. As the veteran police scholar David Bayley argues, ‘The police do not prevent crime. This is one of the best kept secrets of modern life. Experts know it, the police know it, but the public does not know it. Yet the police pretend that they are society’s best defense against crime and continually argue that if they are given more resources, especially personnel, they will be able to protect communities against crime. This is a myth.’
In All Our Trials, a 2019 book by Emily L. Thuma, we see that the history of policing coincides with the need of the state to crush citizen movements.
This immense influx of resources directly aided police and indirectly aided the FBI in criminalizing radical social movements in general and the Black Power movement in particular. As critical geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes, “the disorder that became ‘crime’ had particular urban and racial qualities, and the collective characteristics of activists (whose relative visibility as enemies inversely reflected their structural powerlessness) defined the face of the individual criminal.
It isn’t surprising then, that the police in India too play an active hand in crushing Dalit, Muslim and women-led movements.
Worldwide, the failures are not of the police alone; what we are seeing is the failure of society to treat everyone as equals, and this society then uses the police to hammer all the nails who protest.
One idea that has been the exception to the trend has been of the ‘community police’ initiative in Kerala, and experiment called the Janamaithri Suraksha Project. According to a resource, “apart from preventing crimes in local communities, one of the greatest achievements of the programme has been the growing trust between the police and public. “We have been successful in making the community own the project”, said Dr Sandhya. “This concept has to come slowly into our country. IaJt will solve internal security problems and create mutual trust between the police and the public.”
However, if the answer indeed lies with the community itself, do we even need the police? If initiatives like Janamaithri Suraksha can help provide the basics, de-condition messages that make it okay to oppress others, create empathy between rival groups, aid reform instead of punishment, and slowly eradicate crimes, what will the police even do?
“We’re asking cops to do too much in this country,” said former Dallas police chief, David Brown, speaking of the situation in the USA. “Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding, let the cops handle it… Here in Dallas, we got a loose dogs problem: Lets have the cops chase the dogs. Schools fail, let’s give it to the cops... That’s too much to ask. Policing was never meant to solve all those problems.”
For India, the way ahead should begin with police-public partnerships. One such example is the grassroots movement of the Nari Adalat, which is run by local women, to help with issues of dowry harassment, sexual assault and other crimes against women, and is far more effective and faster than the judiciary and the police. They have an impressive record of settling cases and have often succeeded in getting the police to record such crimes.
Newer problems need newer solutions, and yes, from where we stand today, those solutions look unlikely, but there was a time when ending slavery or women’s suffrage seemed unlikely, too. Worldwide, the failures are not of the police alone; what we are seeing is the failure of society to treat everyone as equals, and this society then uses the police to hammer all the nails who protest. The police are the symptom, not the disorder.
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Sadaf Vidha (she/her) is a therapist and researcher with five years of experience. She is interested in cross-disciplinary understanding of human behavior at the intersections of mental health, sociology, social justice and economics. In her free time, she likes to read, paint, bake and play with her cats. You can find her on Instagram: @shrinkfemale and Twitter: @randomwhiz.
