Earning Legitimacy

If you haven’t heard of Gore Committee, National Police Commission (NPC), Ribiero Committee, Padmanabhaiah Committee, Malimath Committee, Police Act Drafting Committee (PADC), the Second Administrative Reforms Commission (ARC), the Prakash Singh case, and the proposed Model Police Act (MPA), it would be no surprise. It would also be a pity, because they touch our lives in a way that shapes democracy.

They describe an arc of recommendations for police reform in India. From Gore Committee in 1971 to the Prakash Singh case, they are a coherent blueprint of how well-meaning people have imagined a reformed police system looks like. They have addressed constitutional and institutional reforms (autonomy, tenure, accountability and separation of functions) and organisational reforms (recruitment, training, staffing, investigation, technology and working conditions) but left the political and the social questions (changing the incentives that make political interference useful and police arbitrariness tolerable) broadly unresolved. Practically none of the recommendations, despite their internal consistency and a valiant Supreme Court intervention via the Prakash Singh case, has made any difference to the conditions that caused them to be made. So, MPA will take another stab at it.

But today’s inquiry is focussed on a specific subset of those concerns. It is an interesting observation that the earlier commissions (Gore, NPC) concerned themselves with what kind of people were required for police work. (Later ones seemed to focus more on “modernising” than “reforming”, another story for another time). They talked about the need for people with “exceptional ability, intelligence and alertness; physical courage and stamina; honesty and impartiality; character; aptitude for police work; the sense that they are a servant of the law responsible for protecting the dignity and rights of citizens; and, for senior ranks, leadership, decision-making ability, resilience under stress and the ability to respond appropriately to failure”. Padmanabhaiah echoed this, though in more organisational language, even proposing a mission statement to be affirmed as an oath by every police employee on induction.

They all recognised a fundamental truth of order in a society: that the police officer on the street is where the abstract idea of the state becomes a physical experience for a citizen. One interaction can teach a person, more than any textbook, whether the rules are for their protection or for their subjugation.

That is why good policing requires a lot of very good training – of presence, of proportionality, of respect for contrary opinions, and of acknowledging that the awesome authority the governance system gives you is meant to be used for the welfare of society, not as a demonstration of raw power. These are not “soft skills” as one of the commissions called them. They are the technical skills of legitimacy.

Presence is the capacity to be calm when everyone else is not. To slow a situation down rather than speed it up. That takes training. Proportionality is judgment under pressure. Anyone can learn to apply maximum force. It takes far more skill to apply “just enough” – to know when a word will do what a baton cannot. That takes training. And respect for contrary opinion is the hardest one, because the officer is given an extraordinary asymmetry of power. They must voluntarily refuse to use it as raw power; value using it for welfare, not demonstration. That takes training.

Most systems get the selection and training backwards. They select for physical fitness and compliance, and they train for law and procedure, and they hope that temperament and wisdom will somehow appear on the job. It rarely does. They entrust the police with conveying trust and reassurance, but they neither screen them for suitability at induction, nor give them the scaffolding that would build that muscle.

That is the big gap (among others that we are not talking about today) that the police organisations of this country have not bridged. The commissions have provided a good list of qualities, but there has been little attention to the obvious next question: How do you reliably identify, recruit and develop a person who possesses those qualities? The difference between saying "police officers should be resilient, honest, impartial, empathetic, courageous and capable of sound judgement" and developing a selection, development and assessment system capable of identifying, fostering and valuing those characteristics is enormous.

It is no wonder that police forces of this country stand as living examples of a legitimacy deficit. Recent events across the country are fresh in our minds, but such events happen every year, everywhere with a sickening regularity. When people feel “policed at” rather than “policed for”, their questioning the institution is inevitable. But if we agree we need a way to safeguard public peace – and every complex society does – then the only serious path is better people, better prepared, better held.

It is serious work; it takes time and commitment. But it is not impossible. We know how to build the processes that will bring it about. We know how the right call awakens a calling. We’ve been there, all of us.