Police brutality at Gurgaon

Amit has a link filled post on what happened at Gurgaon yesterday. As far as I can make out, it was not a case of crowd-control gotten out of control. It was a retaliatory act. The police beat up the protesters to punish them. Amit points out, correctly, that both sides seem to be responsible for escalating the fight. That may be true, but that is not the point. These are not two “sides”. One “side” is the police, who are an instrument of the government. If my speculation is true -i.e. they beat up the workers as a punishment for the crime of beating up the policemen, the policemen should be punished more than the guilty workers. I am sure Amit will agree with me on this.

One thing about us Indians is that we haven’t yet understood why we have this whole system of policemen and courts. We have no illusions about policemen. We know that they are brutes. We middle-class guys know exactly what will happen to us if we ever get caught by the police. But we also see the policemen as brutes to be unleashed on others. We are alarmingly sanguine about the police using beatings and torture to extract confessions. We nod our heads and say that this is the only way they will understand. We don’t bat an eyelid when police shoot dead gangsters and terrorists in staged encounters. If you point out that this is illegal, we will angrily ask you if the human rights of criminals are more important than the security of law-abiding people.

Please understand. This whole “innocent-until-proven-guilty” thing is not to protect criminals. It is to put a check on the government. It is to make the police work better.

Firstly, if beating up people without trial were an appropriate way of punishing the guilty, then there would have been no need for a police. I and you could do the same ourselves. Of course, chances are we would sometimes beat up the wrong people. Sometimes, we would beat up the guilty people, but because there was no proof and no due process establishing that they were guilty, they could accuse us of wrongly beating them up and organize their own gang to beat us up. This will lead to an escalating war of attrition, also known as the “Hobbesian trap”. The reason why we have policemen and the courts is to break the trap. To break it, it is not enough to give some people uniforms and send them to act on our behalf. The beaten up will quickly realise that it is just a cosmetic change. We need to have a system where the guilty are punished, only the guilty are punished, and the process leaves no doubt about who is guilty. Unless we have such a system, the police will just become instruments of one side in a war between groups of people.

Secondly, we know that the policemen are corrupt. We have experienced it ourselves. What makes you think that they will suddenly turn into paragons of virtue when they shoot criminals and terrorists? Is there any chance that they won’t let go of the guilty and shoot the innocent if they get a large enough bribe? The court system is a useful check on this.

Thirdly, investigations aren’t only to punish the guilty. They are also to catch other guilty people who are still at large. Just shooting people who they think are criminals lets the police get away with sloppy investigation. The “beat-up-people-till-they-confess” method has the same disadvantage.

That brings me to the only valid excuse that the police can give for what they do. Our courts don’t work. It is impossible to get any conviction however well the police investigated the crime. Cases take years while the accused are out on bail and probably terrorising witnesses. This fact sometimes makes me nod in approval when “encounter specialists” in the police say that they just kill criminals because it would have been impossible to get a conviction.

Sorry, but that is not an acceptable compromise. Usually it is the leftists India who (properly) oppose police brutality, but they don’t offer solutions. The right-wingers use this to call those leftists anti-national, claiming that they side with the terrorists and criminals. We libertarians should focus on solutions. Getting the courts to work quickly and efficiently is the most important reform that we can carry out. We capitalists should be championing that more.

4 thoughts on “Police brutality at Gurgaon

  1. labor and police are both thugs. made for each other. bring out the pop corn and watch the fun.

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