What the police have to do with commerce and development

Najma Sadeque
10-02-08

It was the philosopher Plato, who lived many centuries ago, who said that a government should pay their protective forces as little as possible, at least at the lower levels that come directly in contact with the public, so as to keep them dependant on the system. - Meaning keeping them so poorly paid that they are forced to be corrupt and extract bribes from the public to survive, and therefore blindly obey unjust orders of the state so as to hang on to the job they need. This certainly diminishes respect for a man who is revered as a great philosopher but turns out to be arrogant and class-conscious. Many Pakistanis have reason to believe the same of our successive governments.

Because humans are fallible, one cannot dispute that every society, every country, needs a police force. The disagreement is over the objectives of policing and who the police should be accountable to.

Just as there cannot be democracy or justice without an independent judiciary, fair play and deterrence of injustice and wrongs cannot be implemented and enforced without an effective and accountable police. But our successive governments chose to hold on the colonial police system that they inherited. That system was meant to maintain the supremacy of colonial masters by any means, so what essentially happened in 1947 was that external colonization was simply replaced by internal colonization.

Apart from maintaining law and order, the police function remains ensuring that the public does not come in the way of the government, federal, provincial or local, even if what the government was doing is deemed morally or legally wrong.

Five years back there was an attempt at police reform, and within a couple of years that was sabotaged. So naturally, the common perception, based on reality, remains that the police exists only to serve those who rule, the elite and the middle class.

Our governments consistently claim that we are an independent, sovereign country. But the fact remains that our people have never been independent in the real sense of the word for most of our history, and so far no government or political party has shown any evidence that they want it either by changing the structure of the police.

By being conditioned and trained to remain ignorant and not to have a world view or even a country view or even of themselves in the context of the rest of society, the police are unable to see beyond the narrow mandate given to them. They do not know how integral they are to the best and balanced performances of all sections of society and country. They do not understand -- because it is never explained to them -- how necessary a good police system is for a healthy economy or for public character or for patriotism or a just society. At the same time their effectiveness is compromised by arbitrary and sweeping powers at the ground level that are an open invitation for abuse and profit.

We constantly hear this defense from the police, when they are accused of overstepping their bounds, that they were "just following orders" -- that they were "just doing their job"; that they were doing as they were trained to do unquestioningly. That may be true, but that explanation is no longer acceptable in this day and age when countries are required to be democratic, and citizens demand justification for the taxes they pay and the freedoms they sacrifice in exchange for governance which includes policing. Besides they seem to forget that they are citizens too with the same needs and aspirations of others. They too can find themselves on the wrong foot when they are unjustly treated, especially when the state tells them to do something wrong and then use them as a scapegoat to the public and blame them for it.

One doesn't entirely blame the police. There cannot be a good police system under unjust and self-serving governments. And political parties and feudalised parliaments are as responsible as the military and the bureaucracy for roping in the police to serve their purpose instead of the public interest.

There are many countries around the world that have been and still are referred to as "police states", including those countries which are military dictatorships, meaning that the police are used to keep the people subservient. It is an unjust term because it is the government, whatever kind, that requisitions the police to do its dirty work.

Authoritarian minds often argue that great development and modernisation have come to absolute governments like China, a giant of a country, and Singapore, a very small country, where there is no democracy at all. About Singapore it may be said that because it has a small population and area, it was easier to manage, and because it offered a high standard of living for all people, most willingly sacrificed some democratic liberties in return for personal socio-economic benefits which are extensive. Whether this lasts indefinitely cannot be said with certainty.

About China, development has come at great human cost. It is completely a police state and only the entrepreneurs and industrialists and investors have gained hugely from it. Most labour is so badly paid it is highly profitable to invest there so that their exports undercut and destroy the industries nd workers of countries they export to making similar products. We can see the disastrous effects in Pakistan, Forced labour of their prisoners on a massive scale is as notorious in China as it is in America. China's huge population may require more rigorous discipline to manage; but that is all the more reason for decentralization and local autonomy so that there can be better management and democratic policing.

Citizens also have a quarrel with how the police are recruited, particularly at the lower levels where guns and dandas and tear gas are used. Whether or not they admit it, people at the top rungs of hierarchies, still tend to believe in terms of inherently superior and inferior classes based on ethnicity or education or occupation. All too often they reject or avoid the reality that given the same opportunities and support, someone from the poorest classes can do as well or better than those from the most privileged. Why? -- Because they don't want a change in the status quo, because greater equality would mean giving up some of their own undue advantages. That is still the state of affairs today and the cause of violent unrest and crime.

In the same breath, today's governments want to advance and step up the pace of development so that it comes to level with other modern countries in the world. But you cannot have democracy as well as full development without a just and efficient police and judicial system. Why? Development is not just physical infrastructure and economy and output and exports. It is mostly the development of people. In this context, it means getting the best out of people that they are capable of; the realization of their full potential so that they can have better lives while doing better work. That cannot happen unless they can expect a fair deal. If they find that some people can get away with bending the law and they cannot, it may not be worth developing the way the state wants them to. Maybe it's more profitable to be a fraud and a cheat.

Development and rights for all, as opposed to development and rights for a privileged minority, is not possible without allocation of essential resources and services for all citizens. That cannot happen without a democratic system. The relationship between the police system, and development and democracy is not just freedom of expression and fair elections but also equal rights and opportunities, access to public resources and assets, and redistribution of wealth usually according to occupation and geographical location, everyday transactions between people.

All this has to be enforced. - People are aware in all these processes that if they violate the law they could be arrested. Yet others will consider how much bribe they will have to pay to get away with violation. Sometimes when it is enforced, or more often when it is denied, it still needs police force or threat of police force, whether to maintain the status quo or change the status quo.

What, it may be asked, do the police have to do with globalisation? Globalisation, simply put is intensified trade and investment and other interactions between countries with minimum obstacles and regulations. It has its good side and bad side. A sovereign country has to first provide for its own citizens needs; it should only be allowed to sell off its surplus. What has happened in many countries is that big local investors or foreign investors have not just exported surplus but also the share that is needed by citizens. That was what caused our wheat crisis recently. That is what the colonial masters used to do which used to cause widespread famine. And they used the local police forces to suppress hungry, rioting people.

The reason why globalisation is mentioned is because, increasingly in Pakistan, state assets and opportunities that should first go to citizens are passing into the hands of foreign investors. The more that goes into foreign hands, especially of essentials, the less sovereign we are. Already foreign investors, like foreign diplomats, get preferential treatment and more protection from government and the police, although both are paid for by the taxpayers and not knowingly for these purposes. In effect, the police serve vested interests that include foreign interests.

This is a major part of the reason that poverty has risen. The greater the poverty, the greater the unrest, the more people resort to crime as a livelihood, and the greater the desperation. When despair reaches an intolerable peak, it breaks out in violence because survival needs, just needs are not fulfilled. It does not solve the problem to quell violence with violence. The resentment and the violence only grows and it becomes a vicious circle, whether internally or between countries.

This may be hard to believe but there are some countries where the police are so respected and so revered that in small cases whether to do with commerce or domestic matters, they are often called upon by the local community to arbitrate in a dispute to save the time and expense of going to court. That is the kind of police most people want and need. But such police are not recruited on the basis of willingness to follow orders unquestioningly in applying brutal force or on the basis of education alone. They gain it from years of balanced and fair behaviour, and they are conscious of the fact that they are accountable to the community and the people, which is built into their constitution. You will not find that in ours.

The fact is society cannot be served by a police system that has to maintain law and order as well as protect the public. It is being both prosecutor and defense. This is a contradiction in terms because often the maintenance of law and order is imposed at the cost of the public's expectations of justice. The police have to learn to respect human rights and civil rights also, something difficult to do when they have orders to beat up people mercilessly. But it would be best done by separating the two functions into two organizations, the second one exclusively for the protection of the public, and under an independent judiciary and accountable to the people, while the former can continue to serve the government, but not able to with impunity.

We know that many police don't like doing what they are forced to do; it also makes them targets of very angry people bent on taking revenge by giving the police a taste of the same medicine. For that the state is to blame. However, the state is not always responsible for certain routine abuses against the helpless, especially women and children although the unchecked mentality is. Police absorb bad attitudes from their superiors. NGOs have often been called on to sensitize the police. But can police trained to blindly follow brutal orders, and know they are not accountable to the people, be sensitized?

Now the limits of public tolerance have been breached. With the path set on reform of the judiciary, the reform of the police is inevitable because the two have to work in tandem. One interprets the law and makes the decision; the other enforces it. Neither can be effective without the other. At the moment we see a glimmer of hope in the lawyers movement which among other things want to see justice right to the grassroots level. That means police reform as well. You cannot have judicial reform without police reform and vice versa. They have to be worked at simultaneously from the top and from the bottom.

For the police system, it means doing away with arbitrary powers, and accountability to the people, something that has never existed in Pakistan, not just a governor or minister or president. Accountability to the people cannot be reliably vested in the government and would have to be placed separately where it can be safely independent and unbiased, possibly under a new independent judiciary under elected government under the 1973 constitution as a starting point which has not been embellished and mutilated by ordinances and other insertions by military governments.
(Based on a presentation to police, lawyers and NGO representatives at an interactive dialogue organized by SHEHRI)