Cops as criminals

Another of my favourite topics - of the way we train our police. Looking at how they behave with the public, their training needs to be overhauled.

Time and again we come across cases where the police become perpetrators of crime. The police record of the way they deal with women is terrible, and downright atrocious if they happen to be poor and illiterate.. Apart from being brutal, as noted in an earlier post, there have been cases of the police resorting to sexual harassment and even rape. The police stations in India are the most women unfriendly places. Women are reluctant to walk into police stations to seek help or lodge a complaint. For the demeanor and the manner in which the policemen in India behave with women is downright crude (for want of a more apt word).

Last week, on June 18 we learnt of how two policemen threw a pregnant woman and her three-year-old daughter off the running Mailani-Gonda passenger train near Lucknow, after she and her husband refused to bribe them for travelling without a ticket. The woman came under the wheels of the train and died. The little girl miraculously escaped.

The public is so fed up with the high handed ways of the police force that neighbours and relatives of the couple caught hold of the two cops and beat them up mercilessly. They are said to have suffered multiple injuries and had to be admitted to hospital.

Our police trainers need to pay particular attention to the manner in which uniformed men should interact with the public. They need lessons on how to deal with law breakers, especially women, in a firm manner without getting physical. Some years ago I saw the police conduct a raid on a brothel on Brigade Road in Bangalore. The manner in which they were pulling out the sex workers from a building and pushing them into the police van was a terrible sight indeed. Most of the women appeared to be in their mid teens and with the brutal handling their clothes were torn. Some of them could not even cover themselves up properly. The policemen were dragging them by their hair, hitting them with lathis and shepherding them into the van while shouting filthy expletives. As happens in India a huge crowd had gathered to see what was going on and all the women looked really frigthened. They were facing a public humiliation of the worst kind. It doesn't need much imagination to know that the ordeal of these women would have continued into the police station.

Every other day, there are cases of women being raped by the police or security personnel. Increasingly one is seeing the public hit back, in the form of protests and demonstrations, so fed up are they of the way the men who should be protecting turn aggressors.

Look what happened in Kashmir following the rape and murder of two women in Shopian district allegedly by security forces.

In Bhopal recently, a 48-year-old woman, arrested in connection with a dowry case, alleged that four policemen raped her inside a police station in Betul district. The woman said she was forced to spend the night in the Amla police station because the police told her it was too late to go to Betul, after a court sent her to judicial custody. The victim alleged that the cops were drunk and had raped her at night. The next morning when she was taken to the Betul jail, she told the jailer about the incident. Her statement was recorded.

Probably, the cops think the women they harass won't complain and that emboldens them. Recently, sons of two policemen in Gujarat were apprehended for raping a teenage girl. The public thrashed the alleged culprits when they were brought to the hospital for a medical examination. While the crowd that thrashed them consisted mainly of men, one could see some women vent their anger against the culprits.

But the biggest shocker was yet to come. There is reason to believe that the culprits were involved in at least seven cases of rape, including one of a mentally challenged girl. The investigators have recovered clippings of the gangrapes from their phones and laptops. After all these alleged culprits are the sons of policemen!

Haryana police needs better training

The Haryana police has once again lived up to its reputation - of being the most gender- insensitive police force in the country. There have been two reported cases in the last one year of women, who had been raped, driven to suicide when the police refused to register their complaint.

It is tough for a woman to come out in the open and say she has been raped. When she plucks up enough courage and comes forward only to find that the authorities who are supposed to help her, turn a deaf ear, she finds herself all alone with no recourse for action against the culprits. Moreover, she lives in the dreaded fear that her tormentors who have escaped punishment, would be emboldened to rape her again.

That the police is insensitive to a woman's plight is to state the obvious. It also suffers from a great class bias. If the woman is from an economically poor strata of society, she has little chances of being heard. In all likelihood, she would be shooed away from the police station. There have been quite a number of cases of women being raped by the men in uniform, who were supposed to protect them.

In Haryana, the two women killed themselves when they found the police refused to listen to them in spite of them trying all means within their power to make themselves heard.

Alka and her husband, spent the past many months running around for justice. Failing in their effort, the couple who have two children below ten years old, consumed poison outside the office of the Inspector General of Police, Rohtak. While Alka died by the time she was taken to hospital, her husband lies critically ill.


According to media reports, Alka said she was gangraped by five men in Samalkha town in Karnal district last year. The police there did not register a case despite her complaint. She then met the IGP who forwarded her complaint to the Karnal district police chief. However, the case was later cancelled by the police who said that nothing could be found during investigations.
Senior Haryana police officials have refused to comment on Alka’s death.


In June last year, another young woman, Sarita, had consumed poison inside the Haryana police headquarters in Panchkula near Chandigarh, alleging that the police were not taking any action on two of its own personnel who had raped her inside a police station in Rohtak April last year.

 The action by Sarita and Alka and her husband, is a statement that a society that does not even hear them out is not worth living in.

These are just two cases that have come to the media's attention. There are bound to be many more cases, where women after failing to register complaints against their tormentors, just give up, picking up pieces of their lives as best as they can and living in constant dread of being bodily harmed and mentally tortured again. The culprits roam free, emboldened that they can target a woman.

Haryana is a state which has become synonymous with a desensitised police force. The selection of its personnel and their training need a urgent closer look and attention. Those who are in charge of selecting suitable men and women for the force, need to ensure that they pick the right candidates. Further, their training needs to be overhauled, so that the state raises a sensitised police force which women feel comfortable in approaching.
http://ibnlive.in.com/news/haryana-cops-ignore-rape-woman-kills-herself/91957-3.html