It has been an Offstumped policy to not comment on individual tragedies or celebrity comedies, but the tragic-comic saga being played out in NOIDA between New Delhi and the Uttar Pradesh Police over the?Arushi murder case?is nauseating. Offstumped will not get into the circumstances of the twin murder or the morality and motives of the deceased and accused in question. We will leave that privilege to the gossip mongering mainstream media.
What is however of concern is the performance of Law Enforcement Agencies at all levels from the Union Home Ministry to the Local Police in a repeat of whats now a nationwide phenomenon.
In the Nithari serial murder case we saw an obfuscation of Criminal Justice with Social Justice. Then in the Burra Bazar Fire we saw the utter of lack of accountability of First Responders to the Local Community they serve. This twin murder in NOIDA has now exposed the utter lack of professionalism and maturity in conducting a homicide investigation resulting in an?unseemly public spectacle.
Offstumped Bottomline: From Nithari to Burra Bazaar to now NOIDA, the alarm bells are ringing on local governance. It is high time the rot in Local Enforcement was stemmed by making it?directly accountable to the Communities it serves through direct democracy in Local Governance. It is imperative that the Police Leadership is drawn from individuals who have a stake in the local community rather than an interest in serving a remote bureaucracy and a distant political class.
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btw, with such rot, can we trust our law enforcement agencies with laws like tada/pota?
while your suggestion is reasonable (i assume on the lines of american police), i wudnt put too much stock on it. the performance of our municipalities and corporations should be a clue.
IMO, what would make a great difference in the performance is transparency in the functioning and sensitizing the dept to the local community. people should be willing to look up to the police and not resent them.
Supreme Court recently gave order of Bifurcation of Police into three institutions with a view to insulate the police from extraneous influences, according functional autonomy and ensuring accountability…
Sadly ,only some of the state governments have acted on this order while the others have not….
The Full article can be read at..
http://www.littlemag.com/security/prakashsingh.html
On a related topic, here is an interview of Neelam Katara in today’s IE.
http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/Exclusive-interview-with-Neelam-Katara/316586/
She raises an important point there:
We blame everything on the police but the average policeman is not trained to carry out proper investigations. He is supposed to look after VIPs, manage law and order, general security and then how is he supposed to carry out investigations too?
There is no separate agency for carrying out proper investigations, which is why you see for every other case it is demanded that it be handed over to the CBI.
I think the local law enforcement can be very erroneous too, but how is it possible to make them directly accountable?
And imagine the islamic areas picking their own constables.. chaos!
The local law enforcement is not perfect and far from decent, but it is still very necessary that some basic things do not change.
And the case in question, without going into details, does not seem that flawed, except that the police should not have gone on to make the personal mails, character definitions and other plausible but not provable things public.
I remember reading a lots of Police upgradation news in NDA term with the Home portfolio under LKA. I cannot find any such in this govt under Shivaraj Patil. Shivaraj was indeed a black horse rightly given the Home by mataji to sabotage the entire L&O machinery and to make the law ineffective to counter terror.