The dominant image of an Indian police officer, etched in people's minds and embedded in films, is that of a slothful, rude and bribe-taking constable.
But the police officers protest the depiction as unfair, saying they are overworked, underpaid and subject to abrupt transfers that disrupt any attempt to get to know the neighbourhoods they pledge to protect.
Hazari Lal has been posted to 13 stations in as many years. And like other Indian police officers, he is on call 24 hours, with no weekly day off, he said.
“The police work without rest. It makes us irritable. And we take it out on the people who come to us for help,'' Lal, a station house officer in Shahjahanpur, about 128 kilometres southwest of New Delhi, said as he took off his khaki-coloured beret and placed his two mobile phones inside it.
"We always carry an unknown fear called ‘transfer' in our hearts because we can be posted out to a faraway station anytime.''
The perception of poor police performance caught the attention of the Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which said the negative image created a stumbling block for effective police work in India.
Researchers conducted a survey in 2005-2006 in the western state of Rajasthan and found that more than 70 per cent of crime victims never reported incidents because many felt that the police would either do nothing or ask for a bribe to file a complaint.
More than 80 per cent said no constable had ever visited their neighbourhood. The survey also found that an average of 64 per cent of police officers were transferred every year.
The MIT researchers launched a project to try to fix the distrust and to rev up the morale of the police in 162 stations in Rajasthan.
They gave police officers a weekly day off, froze transfers, invited a community volunteer every day to the station to observe the police work, rotated work among officers and trained the police in etiquette, stress management and scientific investigation skills.
The Poverty Action Lab provides evaluation tools to study policy and has assessed health and education programmes in Rajasthan. Its evaluation report was presented recently. “
For a policeman, the personal life is nil. But during the MIT project, we spent more time with our family and felt relaxed at work.
We no longer felt pushed around by politicians who interfered in investigation and threatened to transfer us,'' said Rajkumar Sharma, a constable in Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan."
We were also taught how to attend to the complainants politely.'' The trials created such a buzz that local police officers refer to these police stations as “ MIT-thana'' or “ MIT-station'' .
The MIT team said the freeze on transfers produced a 19 per cent drop in the public's fear of the police.
The behaviour training yielded a 30 per cent increase in crime victims' satisfaction with the handling of complaints.
But the weekly day off produced only a 3 per cent increase in police morale.
“ We are not experts in policing but we wanted to provide officials with rigorous evaluation of policy interventions,'' said Daniel Keniston, a PhD candidate at MIT who coordinated field research for the project.
"Local people should feel comfortable working with the police and the police's familiarity with the area is critical.''
With the rising wave of terrorist attacks in the country in the past two years, including in Rajasthan, analysts say the subject of police reforms may gain urgency.
Indian police, a legacy of the 19th-century colonial British system, have been trained to be the government's coercive arm.
That image has stuck. But officials complain that the police are severely understaffed, underfunded and overstretched.
Although the MIT survey found crimes underreported, every other problem is brought to the police department's doorstep, officers complain — including power outages, water shortages and clogged drains.
Several government committees and a Supreme Court ruling have recommended reforms.
But they have not been implemented because of bureaucratic and political unwillingness to loosen control over the police force.
“Two years ago, we kept pleading with the government to give the police a day off in a week and to have a shift system. They said no,'' said M.K. Devarajan, additional director-general of police in Jaipur, who supervised the MIT project. “There is a lack of political will and resources.''
The Rajasthan police department wants to extend the MIT recommendations for etiquette training and the presence of the community observers to 150 more stations.
But according to the MIT report, the community observer programme did not have any impact on softening the public perception of the police.
