Police Memories

I am drawn to themes of crime, especially law and order and justice. Almost half of what I read is crime fiction. I like books and movies with police procedurals at least as much as suspense and detective fiction. I occasionally spend hours reading about true crime cases and investigations. I realized that I even prefer games with these themes (especially in a noir setting) far more than, say, war games.

The charm of the Police is easy to fall for. Whereas a soldier may be a national hero to one country and a national enemy to another, and therefore his or her roles and acts inherently ambiguous, a policeman on the other hand is a social character with clear goals. The Police face a problem that can be attempted to be controlled but not eliminated from a non-dystopian society. (I subscribe to the views I found resonant in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange.)

I like and think about these themes more than I intend to discuss about right here and right now. Instead I will get verbose about various ways in which the Police are difficult to like in the Indian society.

పొలీసాడు గడప తొక్కాడు. A policeman entered the house.

That is how my mom described the worst damage from a major fire accident in our house some months ago. It is a sentence that occasionally rings in my mind with deep sadness. I am not sure if my parents got some శాంతి done to counter that evil, though I won’t be surprised.

On 15^th August, 2011, when I and my dad were in a shop that made and fit frames, a policeman entered the shop. The setting was fraught with tension because on national holidays, according to some labor law, owners of all non-emergency enterprises should disallow workers from working. The shop owner knew it, and was conducting business with the shutters half pulled down. The policeman knew it, I guess because it’s a big day for him in terms of wages as well as catching law-breakers. But the policeman came with a portrait to get it framed. His opening remarks were about some senior policeman who never pays for anything, and how he himself was not like that and thus deserved a decent discount. The shop owner spoke his mind, including not so subtle hints that the Police are always fleecing small businessmen even on Independence Day, and the policeman got more aggressive and started cursing.

There are a few other memories as an adult. Like when a friend’s house was burgled (twice), the investigating policeman suggested that an FIR would be useless because burglaries get little priority compared to cases involving violence. Of course, cases without FIRs get no priority. Or like when the investigating policeman of a murder case I was acquainted with gave a press statement in which he said that the victim was a vegetarian and the accused/suspect was a non-vegetarian. That apparently was a crucial psychological profiling in the case. Or like when a policeman once visited me in a hospital to take an FIR about the accident where no second party was involved, and collect some mandatory payment, without a receipt, of course. Every time I got pulled over by a traffic cop – at least 4 times – my only instinct was to pay the fine and flee as quickly as possible, trying not to look him in the eye. It was as if even their presence could reduce my lifespan, apart from the ignominy of standing a few feet away from them.

It is a norm for the Police to charge some fees during verification as part of a passport application, just like the postmen do. In college days, most moms used to warn us never to go to the police station all alone for this verification and to never haggle with them (unlike while buying vegetables and groceries). I know many people who consider visiting a police station to be unfortunate and dangerous.

In one of the schools that I studied in, about half the students in my class were children of policemen. We were very young, so I never heard any police stories (except that one fellow’s father worked in some intelligence department), but there were stories about one father belting a child and another father kicking a child from behind and another father locking up a child in the bathroom. These were very few and spread over five years, but they still created an impression that police parents are in general stricter, almost cruel. Unlike doctors’ children becoming doctors, CAs’ children becoming CAs, everybody else becoming engineers, nobody became a policeman. Nobody does.

Probably my first memory about the Police was from when I was seven years old. I and my brother were sitting at the entrance of a jewelry shop while my parents were shopping inside. A police jeep stopped outside the shop, and from it a man and an old woman got down. The jeep went ahead to park somewhere on the roadside. The man, wearing a white shirt and khaki trousers, sat beside me while the woman went inside the shop. The man started small talk, with questions about our names, classes, and then my dad’s job (మీ నాయనేం చేస్తాడు?). My dad wasn’t a policeman. The man talked about how the Police are the most respected, pointing how even their mothers got attention from total strangers. Even at such a small age I could see that what he said was totally not right.

These are a sample from nearly twenty years of memories. But in all my life there isn’t a single instance where the Police could be seen in a positive light. If there was any, my mind successfully suppressed it. The only applicable adjectives are cheap, corrupt, cruel, fearsome. The Police are the boogeymen for children and adults alike.

Indian Police have a major image management issue. This is also true about politicians, bureaucrats, increasingly people in judiciary, and probably all public sector fields. But I think the contrast is clearer when the Police are considered. Such an image will create problems in their recruitment and day-to-day operations.