When police turn killers, law and order dies first

Malathi was trembling when she stepped into the Thiruppuvanam police station in Sivagangai district of Tamil Nadu on the night of June 27. Her 27-year-old son Ajith Kumar, a guard at their village temple, was detained there on charges (not yet officially framed) of stealing some jewellery that a visitor had allegedly kept in her car, which she had asked him to park. Malathi saw her son shirtless and bruised, barely able to speak. She didn’t believe that her son would steal, yet she told him to return the jewellery if he had taken it. “I didn’t steal anything, amma,” he told her. The next day, Ajith Kumar was dead.

Postmortem examination found 44 external injuries, besides cigarette burns, on his body. Every blow Ajith took from the policemen, now facing murder charges in a CBI inquiry, has left the Tamil Nadu police and the govt bruised. If they fester long enough to remain a discussion point during the assembly election early next year, DMK will have to pay a price (ask Edappadi Palaniswami how the custodial deaths of P Jayaraj and his son J Bennix in 2020 hurt AIADMK’s electoral prospects the following year).

PMK leader K Anbumani says there were 28 custodial deaths – and zero convictions – in the past four years of DMK govt. I haven’t fact-checked this statement, but I won’t be surprised if he is right.

Police atrocity is a global crime, and its socio-political impact is steeped in history. The US has a bloody history of police violence, often fed and fuelled by racism. Incidents such as the police torture of Rodney King in 1991 led to the Los Angeles riots the following year when the police officers who were caught on tape beating the black man for alleged drunk driving walked free. The ‘Black Uprising’ was so fresh in public memory that it likely influenced the jury that found OJ Simpson not guilty of killing his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman in 1994. Later, the killings of Trayvon Martin, Rekia Boyd in 2012, and Michael Brown and Eric Garner in 2014 led to the Black Lives Matter movement.

In India, police have found underprivileged people easier targets to train their lathis and, in some cases, guns. Despite repeated observations of the Supreme Court of India that the authorities should show zero tolerance towards police high-handedness, men – and some women – in khaki continue to torture suspects, sometimes with zero evidence. India is yet to ratify the UN Convention Against Torture, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1984.

I shed no tears for rapists who take a bullet or two in their head – or hardened criminals who get away with broken limbs after those ubiquitous falls in the slippery bathrooms of our police stations. But when police unleash violence on someone for presumed guilt, those wielding the lathis deserve more than a rap on the knuckles. A common justification by these sadists is “pressure from the top” to extract a confession. Such ‘tough’ men in khaki lack the guts to take on the erring mighty; they are also often the first ones to prostrate at the political masters’ feet.

If our police brass and policy makers are earnest in making policing less brutal and more efficient, a good place to start would be this 75-year-old paper in the American Journal of Police Science titled ‘Police Discipline’, written by G Douglas Gourley (An officer of LAPD that was later responsible for the Rodney King incident). The author says ‘discipline’ often carries a connotation of arbitrary and severe enforcement of rules, which is a narrow conception. His prescription for police forces: indoctrination of a generic discipline and ethics through rounded training, proper organizational structure and longer tenures of police administrators.