It’s about effective law enforcement: Let’s recommit the country

It was the same in Pune a few months ago, where people had to get out onto the streets to ensure that the accused in a hit-and-run case, a 17-year-old son of a prominent builder, was prosecuted properly. People are angry. People are outraged. But beneath it all, people are showing that they do not trust the police and the lower judiciary to deliver justice.

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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 punishment.

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-prioritized. Indeed, the business of prioritization is itself the cause of much of the corruption, politicization 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.

Also read: Written submissions to courts could speed up the delivery of justice

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 implementation of the Supreme Court’s 2006 ruling in the Prakash Singh case. State governments have been loath to implement the order because it 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-a-half years to be brought to court. There they languished for years and decades.

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As Karthik concluded, this leads to a perverse situation where victims are discouraged from reporting crimes and potential offenders are undeterred from committing them.

Despite what you read in books and see on 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 police departments and publicizing 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 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 crimes. 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. India’s 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 public interest litigation filed a decade before that. There is a case to revisit the ruling’s issues in the context of changes in technology, economy and society.

What is clear, though, is that without a determined cooperative federal push, forward movement is unlikely. A national blue ribbon commission, composed of the Union home ministry and all state governments, is a way forward.

Yes, commissions often take long and their reports gather dust, but they create policy anchors that show the way forward.

That’s one big step better than groping in the dark in despair.