In the recent ghastly and inhuman incident concerning the
five year old who was brutally raped, the police tried to shut up the parents
of the child by paying them Rs. 2000. They also caused many hours of delay that
would have been medically crucial for the little girl who was attacked by the
beast. Then one of the senior policemen slapped a woman who was protesting
police apathy in the above incident. In the Nirbhaya rape where a young woman
was so horribly brutalised that her intestines came out, the police were
equally, frighteningly insensitive and scary.
Today, policemen are feared as much as the twisted
remorseless criminals they are supposed to keep at bay. Policemen have begun to
victimise us. Buy why?
What have we done to them? And why us? Why not reserve
that kind of behavior only for criminals?
I hear and read about incidents almost every day of how
the police refused to register an FIR, harassed the victim (recently a 10 year
old girl who had been raped was locked up in a police station for a few days,
because her parents dared to approach that particular police station after
their child had been raped), beat up peaceful protesters, asked for money etc.
etc.
Policemen are literally turning against helpless common
people. However, at the same time if someone is rich or important, they are
giving them special preferential treatment.
But why?
Could it be that all of mankind is becoming meaner,
harsher and less human with every passing day, or does it have to do with the
low wages, insufficient numbers and bad working conditions of the police force?
It could even be that dealing day in and day out with criminals and inhuman
people have made the policemen inhuman themselves. Could it be that every good thing
that policemen try to do just boomerangs, and gets them more and more
frustrated? Could politicians be forcing policemen to act against their will,
to the point that they just give in completely and become bad people?
It could be all of these reasons, but the important thing
is why is it being allowed to happen at all?
If for some reason policemen are becoming more of a
menace than a service, then it needs to change.
Can the media start talking about how to change the core
of the police force, so that they can be saviors instead of terrorisers? We can't sit back and blame the police for
everything, something has to give. Something needs to be fixed and we need to
go and find that something and fix it.
Maybe we can start with the problems that policemen are
facing. Let’s bring their problems to the fore and try to solve them. If the
police system improves, policemen will be better human beings.
Let’s start with something. Really, we can’t let
this happen to us, not in this day and age…
