September 9, 2024 ☼ The Intersection ☼ public policy

Why do ordinary citizens across the country have to stage public protests to demand justice for the victim of a heinous crime at a Kolkata hospital? If we peel away the extraordinary brutality and the political dimension and get to the core of the matter, we find that people have no confidence in the law enforcement system. It was the same in Pune a few months ago, where people had to get out onto the streets to ensure that accused was prosecuted properly. People are angry. People are outraged. But beneath it all, people are demonstrating that they do not trust the police and the lower judiciary to deliver justice.

If we have to prevent crimes against women, we have to get better at preventing crime in general. Unfortunately our politics and public discourse is better at symbolic and symptomatic actions. In response to moral panics we tend to demand fast track courts, special laws and exemplary punishments. It is easy for the establishment to accede to these demands because they satisfy public anger. Their overall effect on law enforcement outcomes is ignored. Few stop to think that fast tracking some cases means many other cases are de-prioritised. Indeed the business of prioritisation is itself the cause of much of the corruption, politicisation and injustice that citizens so despise.

We need a different approach. A systemic solution requires us to upgrade the law enforcement system and bring it into the Information Age. Police, prosecutors and lower courts have simply not scaled up with the explosion of population, technology, social change and diversity in the country. In most places law enforcement officials are just satisficing: they lack the capacity, mandate and motivation to do anything more. Fixing all that is broken is akin to moving a mountain. Yet mountains can be moved if millions of people push in the same direction.

The discussion on police reforms remains stuck at the implementation of Supreme Court’s 2006 ruling in the Prakash Singh case. State governments have been loathe to implement them because that would mean political leaders relinquishing personal control over the coercive apparatus that they covet. As much as these structural reforms are desirable, we need to think of other politically feasible reforms that take us in the right direction.

Here’s an example. In 2017, I asked the gifted data scientist Karthik Shashidhar to help analyse data relating to crimes against women in a large, relatively well-governed south Indian state. He found that the conviction rate for all crimes was abysmally low (less than 1% for molestation, for instance). It was worse in the state capital. Cases took a long time to investigate and on an average took one-and-half years to be brought to court. There they languished for years and decades. As Karthik concluded, this leads to a perverse situation where victims are discouraged from reporting and potential offenders are undeterred from committing the crime.

Despite what you read in the books and see in television, our police forces do not have an adequate number of trained detectives, forensic specialists and prosecutors. Karthik and I found that setting up Specialist Investigation Units within the police departments and publicising successful prosecutions can deter crimes. These units can select cases from across the state, based on a combination of severity and random sampling, so that there is an overall sense that perpetrators will be brought to court promptly. Further, setting up Case Progression Units, with personnel trained in project management techniques can help navigate through the thickets of courts and bureaucracy. Such measures will have a deterrent impact across the board. At the margin, they will deter potential perpetrators from committing the crime. Successful prosecutions will gain media attention and amplify the effect.

Reforms such as these are well within the capacity of state governments and do not require the drastic reforms that politicians are wary of. These are the type of immediate demands that protesters ought to make of their state governments.

Such small changes can yield big improvements, but we also need a national policy commitment towards transforming law enforcement. The new penal code will not magically lead to better outcomes. The experience of the Prakash Singh ruling is instructive. It makes some good recommendations, but these are nearly two decades old and based on a PIL filed a decade before that. There is a case to revisit the issues in the context of changes in technology, economy and society.

What is clear though is that absent a determined cooperative federal push forward movement is unlikely. A national blue ribbon commission, comprising of the union home ministry and all state governments is a potential way forward. Yes, commissions often take a long time and their reports gather dust, but they also create policy anchors that point to the way forward. That’s one big step better than groping in the dark in despair.

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