Delhi Police Commissioner Dr K.K. Paul addressed a public meeting in Delhi recently on the initiatives being taken by the Delhi Police to curb crime in the city. He linked changing patterns of crime to tensions created by rapid urbanisation, and pointed out that Delhi was a magnet for poor people not just from the immediate hinterland, but even from the South. He spoke of the police having interviewed a beggar, who had come all the way from Bangalore because he had heard that a good living could be made here. The man was making Rs 100 a day, begging at traffic lights. I would have liked to ask the police chief for the coordinates of this particular beggar. None of the beggars I know seem to be having a good time. Apart from living in demeaning circumstances, they tell me that the money they collect is not all profit: they have to pay a cut from their daily earnings to the ‘master’ who ‘owns’ their beat. The women say even ‘hafta’ does not protect them from the unromantic attentions of men in and out of uniform who feel they are fair game. The police chief also shared with us the findings of a study conducted by the Delhi Police that identified the most violence-prone areas of the city. According to it, the jhuggi-jhonpri colonies and resettlement colonies like Seemapuri, Samaipur Badli or Sultanpuri were the most unsafe areas in Delhi. The typical offender, according to this study, is an unemployed school dropout who lives in a resettlement colony. If the police chief had more time he would, perhaps, have warned us not to read too much into these findings. He would have pointed out that if most of the people on death row in the US are black men, it is not proof of the innate propensity to violent crime of black men, but confirmation of the ingrained racism of white policemen. He would have told us that whenever a crime is committed in Delhi, police round up ‘habitual offenders’ from the jhuggi-jhonpri colonies and carry out ‘sustained interrogation’, which yield results even if some of the accused do not always survive these measures. The profile of the potential offender constructed by the Delhi Police will make such operations far more efficient, no doubt. Last week, we opened our newspapers and saw the screaming banner headlines announcing that all seven accused in the Jessica Lall murder had walked free, with the judge making several unflattering remarks about the role of the police in weakening the prosecution case. We now hope the police chief will respond promptly to the Delhi High Court order to explain the lapses of his subordinates. As for me, I can’t help wondering if the reason Manu Sharma and his accomplices got away was that they did not fit the profile of the typical ‘criminal’. Manu Sharma is not a school dropout, he’s not unemployed, he does not live in Seemapuri or Nand Nagri, his parents are not poverty stricken migrants in search of the good life in this “world city”. So how can he be one of the ‘bad guys’?
